Maria Spilsbury

Anonymous sale, London, Phillips, 22 June 1999, lot 208 (as At the cottage door);

Anonymous sale, Hilsborough, NC, Leland Little Auctions, 15 June 2019, lot 409 (as At the cottage door);

C. Yeldham, Maria Spilsbury (1776–1820), Artist and Evangelical, Farnham 2010, pp. 81, 83 and 176, reproduced fig. 4.17.

London, Royal Academy, 1807, no. 246;

Possibly the Wedgwood Museum, Burslem, Staffordshire (according to a label on the reverse).

From the young age of fifteen, Maria Spilsbury exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London. She was among some 700 female artists to have exhibited there between 1769 and 1830. The highlight of her prolific career was the Prince Regent’s commission to paint Patron’s Day at the Seven Churches, Glendalough, 1816, The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin, which was considered one of the most celebrated pictures ever painted of ‘Irish manners’.¹ 

This work was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1807 with the title ‘Lavinia Listening to Her Mother’s Mournful Tale ‘Of What Her Faithless Fortune Promised Once’ – Thomson’s ‘Autumn’. It depicts a scene from James Thomson’s The Seasons (1726–30), a series of four poems which proved the source of inspiration for many artists, including Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and William Hamilton. Illustrated here, is a scene from Autumn which contained an anecdote about a young woman named Lavinia who lived with her mother in a cottage in a wooded vale.

¹ Inv. no. 4587; oil on canvas; 106.5 x 128.5 cm.; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/3f/Patron%27s_Day_at_the_Seven_Churches%2C_Glendalough.PNG