Lot 129: John Baptist Malchair 1731-1812 , Bwlch y Groes, North Wales grey wash over pencil, on laid paper

numbered verso : 45 grey wash over pencil, on laid paper

36.6 by 55.4 cm.; 14 1/4 by 21 3/4 in.

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, John Baptist Malchair of Oxford: Artist and Musician, 1998, no. 88;
Dove Cottage, Grasmere, The Solitude of Mountains, Constable and the Lake District , 2006, no. 25

William Crotch;
Mrs Appleby;
L. G. Duke;
with Colnaghi's, London;
Ian Fleming-Williams;
the late R.E. Alton M.C.

THE PROPERTY OF A LADY
John Baptiste Malchair was a professional musician and leader of the resident orchestra of the Holywell Music Room in Oxford. In 1759 he had begun taking on drawing pupils to supplement his income and by the 1770's he had a thriving practice among the university undergraduates. In 1795 Malchair toured North Wales with the Reverend George Cooke, a fellow of Oriel College. The present drawing of Bwlch y Groes, a remote scarp north-east of Dolgelly, is one of fifty-one drawings he made on this trip. This series was brought in its entirety by William Crotch, a pupil of Malchair and a future Professor of Music at Christ Church. Ian Fleming-Williams has suggested that Crotch showed Malchair's Welsh drawings to John Constable in 1806; 'their immediacy and apparent freedom from convention may well have served as an important example to Constable' who subsequently embarked on a seven week tour of the Lake District in the late summer of that year, (Ian Fleming-William, Constable, 1994, pp. 64-5).