Title: Vegetable Market at Frankfurt (1843)

Medium: pencil drawing

Size: 17 x 17 cm

This drawing was offered for auction by Cheffins Auctioneers of Cambridge (www.cheffins.co.uk) on 16 March 2005, with an estimate of £80-£120. It was part of a sketchbook of Eyre Crowe's dating from 1843. His trip to Germany later inspired the paintings Returning from Church and Village Fountain (1869).

Title: Roman Peasant Woman, Seated (1843)

Medium: pencil and red and black chalk drawing

Size: 25.6 x 20 cm

This drawing was given by Michael C. Jaye to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 2004 (PD.35-2004). It was executed on Christmas Day 1843, when Crowe was studying and travelling in Italy with Paul Delaroche and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

An image of the drawing is available on the Fitzwilliam Museum's online catalogue (search for 'Crowe').

Title: San Paolo alle tre Fontane (1844)

Medium: ink drawing

Size: 21½ x 28 cm

This drawing was auctioned in 1996. It dates from the period in which Crowe was studying and travelling in Italy with Paul Delaroche and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Title: Capo le Case, Rome (1844)

Medium: painted sketch

Size: 22 x 26 cm

This drawing was given by Michael C. Jaye to the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge in 2004 (PD.32-2004). It is inscribed 'Capo le case Rome 1844 / opposite my rooms', and dates from the period when Crowe was studying and travelling in Italy with Paul Delaroche and Jean-Léon Gérôme.

An image of the drawing is available on the Fitzwilliam Museum's online catalogue (search for 'Crowe').

Title: William Makepeace Thackeray (1845)

Medium: watercolour

Size: 15 cm x 15 cm

This watercolour does not have a title, but is considered to be of William Makepeace Thackeray. It is dated 4 October 1845, when Eyre Crowe was 20 years old and living with his family in London, having spent the winter of 1843-1844 in Italy with his master, Paul Delaroche, and his fellow student, Jean-Léon Gérôme. He had enrolled as a probationary student at the Royal Academy Schools in July 1845, so had not yet established himself as an artist. Thackeray was a friend of the Crowe family, having met them in Paris in the 1830s. Ever eager to help his friends, Thackeray gave Crowe a commission to transfer to wood the sketches he had made for Notes of a Journey from Cornhill to Grand Cairo, which was published in 1846. According to Peter L Shillingsburg, Thackeray was working on the book through the autumn and into December 1845¹.

The original watercolour was on sale at the Court Gallery, Nether Stowey, Somerset, in the summer of 2002. It was previously in private hands, and is thought to have originally been kept in an album. It is possible that this was the 'Morocco coloured album, containing a collection of Water Colour Drawings and Sketches by Eyre Crowe A.R.A., Bonnington and others' which was sold for £7 7s in a sale of the late Eyre Crowe's belongings by Messrs Furber of London on 22 February 1911².

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1. Shillingsburg, Peter L. 'Pegasus in Harness: Victorian Publishing and William Makepeace Thackeray'. URL : http://65.107.211.206/victorian/authors/wmt/pegasus/ch2f.html

2. A copy of the sale catalogue describing this item, annotated with the price fetched, is in the Archive Department of the University of Wales, Bangor (Garthewin Additional Collection, 1589)

Title: William Makepeace Thackeray (1845)

Medium: pen and ink sketch

This sketch was produced during the work to complete Notes of a Journey. Crowe recalled in 1897, in Thackeray's Haunts and Homes, that when the book was almost finished, Thackeray suddenly decided that he would like his own portrait to appear on the cover:

He pulled out from a drawer a bright new costume he had purchased at Cairo, and soon appeared in full Oriental garb. With the red fez cap and blue tassell on his head, a crimson silk caftan round his body, and sleeves pendant, baggy breeks and red papouche slippers, he ensconced himself on a low divan, grasping a long cherry stick, and, crossing his legs, sat immovable till I had finished my outline.

The sketch reproduced above, published in General J G Wilson's Thackeray in the United States (1904), although signed and dated by Thackeray, corresponds well to the description given by Crowe and is similar in style to the sketches on wood which he produced for Notes of a Journey. The original sketch was in the ownership of Major William Lambert by 1904, and was sold by the Anderson Galleries in 1914. It is referenced in National Portrait Gallery : Early Victorian Portraits, ed. Richard Ormond (HMSO, 1973)

Title: Boulogne sur Mer (1846)

Medium: pencil drawing

Size: 118 x 152 mm

Current owner: Tate Gallery, London

This pencil drawing was purchased by the Tate Gallery as part of the Oppé Collection in 1996. An image is available on the Tate Gallery website. Crowe spent part of his childhood near Boulogne, in northern France, and it was a popular destination for British holidaymakers and those wishing to live more cheaply than in England.

Title: Master Prynne Searching Archbishop Laud's Pockets in the Tower (1846)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1846

The first picture exhibited by Eyre Crowe at the Royal Academy exhibition, two years after his arrival in London, at the age of 21. It was noted in the reviews of the exhibition only by Crowe's friend William Makepeace Thackeray, who was at the time an art critic and journalist at the Morning Chronicle. Thackeray had owed his position there to Crowe's father Eyre Evans Crowe, and the long association between the two families must suggest that he included a notice of young Crowe's picture more out of friendship than artistic merit. The review below should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt:

Morning Chronicle, 11 May 1846: 

Mr Crowe, a new exhibitor we believe, has a picture, 534, Prynne searching Laud's pockets, which promises very well. The puritan and the bishop are capital figures, the head of the latter particularly fine. The artist is as yet deficient in pictorial dexterity, but the picture has energy, good drawing, and character.

However, the picture clearly had charm, as it was chosen by an Art Union prizeholder the same year, according to Eyre Crowe in his diary for 1899. It came up at auction that year, and was bought by a Mr John King of Liverpool for his art dealer father, who offered it for sale at £60.

Another picture by Eyre Crowe, seemingly of the same subject, but signed and dated 1870, was auctioned at Sotheby's in 2008 under the title Soldiers Meeting.

Title: The Battle of Agincourt (1847)

Medium: cartoon [in oil]

The Houses of Parliament in London were burnt down in a fire in 1834. They were rebuilt to a Gothic design by Sir Charles Barry in the 1840s and 1850s. The decoration of the interior was supervised by a Royal Commission of Fine Arts under the presidency of Prince Albert, which was charged with investigating whether the rebuilding would afford an opportunity of encouraging and promoting the Fine Arts. Four open competitions were held, in 1843, 1844, 1845 and 1847, offering financial prizes and the opportunity to produce works of art for the new Parliamentary rooms. The first competitions asked for cartoons (preparatory paintings) for large frescoes for the walls of the Houses of Parliament, and models for statues.

The competition in 1847 was for large-scale oil paintings on elevated themes of British history. 103 exhibitors submitted works. Eyre Crowe's painting was entitled The Battle of Agincourt. It was harshly reviewed in the Athenaeum (July 10 1847):

Mr Eyre Crowe, in The Battle of Agincourt, may possibly have thought confusion a necessary element towards the realization of such a scene. He has, accordingly, produced so much of what is involved and perplexing - aided by no arrangement of light and dark to bring out some forms or subdue others - that the eye cannot rest on any point. The picture is so minute in archaeological details as to appeal more to the antiquary than to the lovers of Art.

When the winners were announced, nine artists were rewarded with prizes varying from £200 to £500. Eyre Crowe was not one of them.

Title: Boulogne Girl Knitting (1848)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1848

Title: Dante and Beatrice (1848)

Medium: oil

This painting was mentioned by Crowe in his diaries on 5 July 1899 and 21 November 1902. It was auctioned at Christie's in London on 8 July 1899, having previously been in the collection of James Dole Esq. of Redland House, Bristol. It was bought by J.J. Wroe, a picture dealer of Manchester. In 1902 it was bought by George Albert Smithe of St Ives, Huntingdonshire.

Title: Luther (1848)

Medium: oil

Crowe mentioned this work and its rejection from the Royal Academy exhibition on 1848 in one of his diaries.

Title: Portrait of a Girl (1848)

Medium: pencil

Size: 21½ x 18 cm

This drawing was put up for auction in 2001.

Title: The Roman Carnival  (1848)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1848

Title: Holbein drawing the Infant Son of Henry VII and his Nurse, Mother Jack  (1849)

Medium: oil

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1849

Copyright (c) 2005 Kathryn J. Summerwill. All rights reserved.