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  • IRISH FOLK ART PORTRAIT TO HIGHLIGHT DREWEATTS SALE

    An Irish School family portrait dating to around 1816 is a highlight at Dreweatts online sale of the British, American and European Folk Art in Newbury, Berkshire on November 24. The portrait of William Winter and his family bears the inscription, ‘Oh pary accept this trifling gift/This token I am far from you/Yet I shall love you still/Though cruel fate has parted me/From my dear friends and loves/Yet may I soon return again/No more from you to roam’.  The portrait of Private William Winter and his family was most probably painted by a professional letter-writer while he was garrisoned in Dublin in February 1816 with the 1st battalion, 48th Regiment of Foot. As the inscription along the lower edge implies he commissioned it as a token of his affection for his family in Gloucestershire. On June 17 that year Winter deserted his regiment and by July 12 had been detained and committed to imprisonment at Chester. The regiment was soon after commissioned to serve in Sydney, New South Wales.

    The Pinkers Collection takes its name from a diminutive 17th century fisherman’s cottage on the Kent coast where it has grown in size over the last twenty years. It includes watercolours and oil paintings from the 17th to the early 20th Century. Many are in their original frames and in remarkably fresh condition. Folk Art has been described as ‘the unselfconscious creativity of academically untrained artists’ (Robert Young, Folk Art, 1999) and it is this quality that gives many of the works an immediacy and playfulness that has chimed with generations of collectors.

    IRISH SCHOOL FAMILY PORTRAIT (£4,000-6,000). UPDATE: THIS SOLD FOR £15,500

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