- Museum number
- Am2006,Drg.54
- Description
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Interior of Leverian Museum; view as it appeared in the 1780s. c1835
Watercolour
- Production date
- 1835
- Dimensions
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Height: 40 centimetres
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Width: 42.60 centimetres
- $Inscriptions
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- Curator's comments
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Sir Ashton Lever (1729-1788) was a gentleman of substantial means whose property included both coal mines and Manchester real estate. He was also a man of many interests, of which ornithology was the overriding passion. In the 1760s and 1770s he acquired an enormous collection of birds, amongst other materials, which he displayed in the former royal palace, Leicester House. As a friend of Captain James Cook, Lever acquired exceptional Pacific ethnography, which was displayed alongside the natural history collections.
Unfortunately Lever overreached himself financially and had to dispose of his collection, by lottery, in the 1780s. Before doing so he commissioned Sarah Stone to depict the birds, ethnography and antiquities. This watercolour, notable for the precise depiction of birds, as well as for the Greenland Kayak, was probably copied from a Sarah Stone drawing, perhaps by Stone herself in later life.
The following text is from K. Sloan, 'A Noble Art, amateur artists and drawing masters, 1600-1800', BM 2000, no. 164, pp. 226-7:
In 1786, Sarah Stone exhibited the original of this 'Perspective view of Sir Ashton Lever's Museum' at the Royal Academy. The watermark on this copy is dated 1835, but it is unlikely that she painted it. As we have seen, the polite recreation of copying paintings in various media and sizes dated back to drawn and limned copies in the seventeenth century; in the eighteenth, many amateurs not only copied paintings and drawings in private collections but also began to copy those on public display. But it was not only works of art that were copied in private collections; the British Museum permitted artists and amateurs to draw and paint objects in its collections and many private museums, like the one set up by Sir Ashton Lever in 1775, also permitted, even encouraged, drawing and painting, by providing 'Good Fires in all in the Galleries' and by displaying their work.
Sarah Stone was the daughter of a fan painter, and in the manner of early limners like Alexander Marshall, she was used to working in bodycolour as well as watercolour and able to mix her own colours. She was undoubtedly trained by her father and assisted him in his work, as her earliest surviving drawings are on smooth, sized paper and rarely have any indication of background in the images. Her usual practice was to sketch the object first in pencil on thin paper and then paint the final version on sized sheets in albums or with more bodycolour and detailed work for framing. Her earliest dated drawings are of objects in the Leverian Museum painted in 1777, two years after it opened; by 1784, she had painted over a thousand. It is not clear whether she first asked permission to draw in the Museum and was then commissioned by Lever or whether she earned her living from this type of work from the beginning; she is said to have been commissioned, but documentation is sparse and there are no records of payment. The drawings apparently belonged to Lever, as in 1784 he advertised in The Morning Post the addition to the Museum of a large room of 'Transparent Drawings in Water Colours, from the most curious specimens in the Collection, consisting of above one thousand different articles, executed by Miss Stone, a young lady, who is allowed by all Artists to have succeeded in the effort beyond all imagination.'
When the Leverian Museum was sold by lottery in 1786, the year she made her record of its interior, he retained her watercolours and when he died two years later, some of them were sold. In 1791 Joseph Banks was offered nearly 800 of her drawings of birds, shells, fossils, etc. although he does not seem to have purchased them (her works now in the Natural History Museum have been acquired since 1930). Her original watercolour of the interior of the museum remained with the contents of the museum itself, which was dispersed by sale in 1806 when it was sold to Mrs Oliphant for ,2. 10s. 0d.(now private collection). The museum had be relocated after the lottery but continued to have objects added to it and Sarah Stone continued to paint there through the 1780s. In 1789 she married John Langdale Smith, a midshipman who shared her interest in painting and exhibited a portrait at the Royal Academy in 1791 when she exhibited paintings of birds at the Society of Artists. She contributed a view of the interior of the museum in its new location in the Rotunda to a published companion to the museum, which showed some of her framed drawings of birds, shells, flowers, etc. hanging on the entrance arch, but she painted little after her marriage, apart from live birds her husband brought back from his voyages. Following a pattern which seems to have been typical for young women who gained reputations as artists, she exhibited at the Royal Academy before her marriage as 'Miss Stone', when she was described as a 'Painter', but afterwards, as 'Mrs Smith', she was an 'Honorary Exhibitor'. There is no doubt that her watercolours, whether she was paid for them or not, served as an additional exhibit or attraction for the owners of the museum, their 'curiosity' value in being produced by a young woman perhaps underlined by her lack of skill in comparison to works produced by her male professional contemporaries.
Literature: Jonathan King, 'Woodlands Art as depicted by Sarah Stone in the Collection of Sir Ashton Lever', American Indian Art Magazine, 18 (2), 1993, pp. 32-45; King, 'New Evidence for the Contents of the Leverian Museum', The Journal of the History of Collections8(2), 1996, pp. 167-86; Christine E. Jackson, 'Sarah Stone: Natural Curiosities from the New Worlds', Merrell Holberton and Natural History Museum, 1998, passim (I am grateful to Jonathan King and Harry Persaud for their generous assistance with this entry and the following)
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Sarah Stone's original watercolour is now in the State Library of New South Wales http://acms.sl.nsw.gov.au/item/itemDetailPaged.aspx?itemID=413333
- Location
- Not on display
- Exhibition history
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2000, 'A Noble Art, amateur artists and drawing masters, 1600-1800', BM room 90, no. 164
2013-2014 22 Sep-5 Jan, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, American Adversaries: West and Copley in a Transatlantic World
- Condition
- good
- Acquisition date
- 1994
- Acquisition notes
- Purchased from Mrs. B. Edmunds with a contribution from Professor Michael Crawford
- Department
- Africa, Oceania and the Americas
- Registration number
- Am2006,Drg.54
- Additional IDs
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Miscellaneous number: Am2006-Drg54-Sto