Irish School c.1860
A Trompe L’Oeil Still life of Bank Notes, Prints and Correspondence on a Table Top
Pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 43.5 x 65 cm

Provenance: Gorry Gallery, Dublin label...

Irish School c.1860
A Trompe L’Oeil Still life of Bank Notes, Prints and Correspondence on a Table Top
Pen and ink and watercolour on paper, 43.5 x 65 cm

Provenance: Gorry Gallery, Dublin label verso

Private Collection, Dublin

Set on a blue background and painted with great illusionistic skill, this is a rare notaphilic document as well as a charmingly idiosyncratic still-life. The distinct sub-genre of still-lives featuring banknotes and other objects and paperwork, grew out of the depictions of letter racks by Evert Collier (1642-1708), a Dutch artist who moved to England at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The genre thrived in nineteenth-century America in the hands of artists such as John F. Peto and the Cork-born painter William M. Harnett (1848-92) (whose ability at painting dollar bills drew the attention of the Secret Service’s counterfeiting team). The present work is an extremely rare, possibly unique, example of the genre to take as its subject Irish banknotes of various denominations, issued in Limerick, Drogheda and Banbridge, and dating from the 1850s. The provincial Bank of Ireland was one of six banks authorised to print currency and the artist copies the original closely. Visual material also features in the still-life, with a watercolour of an Irish colleen in the manner of William Mulready (1786-1863) and an engraving after William Hogarth’s (1697-1764) Sigismonda.

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