DANIEL QUIGLEY (active Dublin c.1750 -1780)
The Chestnut Thoroughbred Mol-Ro Lead by her Groom
Oil on canvas, 62 x 120.5cm (24½ x 46¾”) in its original late Georgian plain hollow frame
Inscribed:...

DANIEL QUIGLEY (active Dublin c.1750 -1780)
The Chestnut Thoroughbred Mol-Ro Lead by her Groom
Oil on canvas, 62 x 120.5cm (24½ x 46¾”) in its original late Georgian plain hollow frame
Inscribed: ‘Mol-Ro taken from the life’ lower left corner

 

Provenance: Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s, 27 November 1969, lot 94 (as James Seymour);

Anonymous sale, London, Christie’s South Kensington, 10 July 1997, lot 107 (as attributed to Thomas Spencer)

 

Daniel Quigley was the first Irish sporting painter of note working in the second half of the eighteenth century. He lived at Cork Hill in Dublin, close by the gates of the Dublin Castle, and painted numerous versions of portraits of famous racehorses and

sporting occasions after such artists as David Morier, Francis Sartorius (who visited Dublin about this date), James Seymour and John Wootton. These were largely executed for the sporting gentry and nobility of Ireland. He also produced, as here, portraits of successful racehorses in his native country.

 

The chestnut mare depicted in the present painting is presumably the same chestnut mare called Moll Roe owned by ‘Col. Blackney’ and recorded as running in Ireland in 1744 at Galway. Her name is taken from the traditional Irish tune ‘Moll Roe [in the Morning]’, a slip-jig (port luascach) written in 9/8 time, which was collected and written down by several music researchers in the nineteenth century, though its origins are considerably earlier. ‘Col. Blackney’ is presumably to be identified with Colonel William Blakeney (1672-1761), who was born at Mount Blakeney, Co. Limerick, eldest of five sons of William Blakeney of Thomastown, Co. Limerick, country gentleman and MP for Kilmallock. A soldier who served though Malborough’s campaigns and was wounded at Blenheim, he was subsequently acclaimed as the ‘defender of Minorca’  In 1759, a statue of Blakeney by the sculptor John Van Nost – and paid for by the Friendly Brothers of Saint Patrick – was erected on Sackville Street in Dublin on the subsequent location of Nelson’s Column and now the Spire. The statue was removed in 1763 after having been severely damaged. George II made Blakeney a knight of the Bath in November 1756 and the same year elevated him to the Irish peerage as the first (and only) Baron Blakeney of Mount Blakeney. 

 

 

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