Studio RT Ltd

Description

We are delighted to offer for sale this beautifully executed watercolour by the English artist Dorothy Buckley DHS, who has signed the painting in the lower right hand corner. Below the mount, the artist has entitled the painting 'Off to the Revels' and inscribed it 'To Kathie W. Joubert from the Artist with love'. As we felt that this was a very personal inscription, we have mounted the painting so that it is not visible.

The painting depicts a woodland landscape with a host of fairies, pixies and elves carrying lanterns, who are all off to the revels. All the woodland animals are watching. There are rabbits, squirrels, frogs, lizards, birds, including a robin in the foreground, sitting on a branch with a spider's web beneath it. There are fairies flitting through the trees, one astride a blue bird and a whole cavalcade of pixies coming over the hill. There are two owls sitting on a branch watching the proceedings.

The more that you look at this painting, the more that you find and it must have taken hours of work by the artist.

On researching Dorothy Buckley, we have found that she appears to have been one of the three major artists working in Birmingham for Shipton & Co. the jewellery chain, as a patent was applied for in 1922 by this company for the manufacture of paintings on the reverse of glass, backed by butterfly wings. This was granted and they made many of these between 1923 and 1939, where WWII brought an end to such frivolity and the company had to do war work. There was a short resurgence after the war, where they were sold on Cunard liners. The paintings signed by Dorothy Buckley and Daisy Smith appear to have more value.

As to her watercolours, we have found two others that have been sold, one landscape and one of fairies. We presume, therefore, that she painted for her own pleasure and possibly as gifts and not for commercial sale. There was another Dorothy Buckley in America, whose name was Dorothy Eva Buckley, but, as she lived most of her life in California and was born in New York, we think that they are two different people.

The watercolour has been newly double mounted in two tone acid free mountboard and is newly framed in a 1 1/4" bronzed gilt frame to suit. It will be supplied wired and ready to hang.

Medium Watercolours