The British Art Journal is back!

This portrait of William Charles Macready (Pl 1) has been glimpsed on the auction circuit since 2015 at least. It was up for sale again on 31 January 2024, and again at Dreweatts on 11 February this year (2025, £14,000 hammer). It was consistently identified as showing Macready as Hamlet – even describing him as ‘in a toga’ – which never made any sense: Macready, obviously yes; Hamlet decidedly no.

In 1802, the ratification of the Treaty of Amiens allowed artists an all-too-brief chance to travel freely across Continental Europe and, as has been documented by many scholars, the 27-year-old JM William Turner and a colleague, Newby Lowson, successfully completed an outstandingly ambitious tour that included part of the Alps. In this research paper, we present new findings about his route, the weather and gain a visual insight of views that must have impressed him greatly.

It has long been thought that Turner made no sketches as he and Lowson trekked around the western side of Mont Blanc from Chamonix to Courmayeur, but our research reveals a series of detailed, large and accurate studies.

In July 1951 Anthony van Dyck’s Portrait of Wolfgang Wilhelm of Pfalz-Neuburg (Pl 1) was stolen from Boughton House, Northamptonshire. It is one of thirty-seven oil sketches at Boughton for Van Dyck’s print series known as the Iconography, a unique group of panels that, until the summer of 1951, had remained together in the same collection since 1682.

This paper tells the remarkable story of the theft, which spans three generations and involves some of the most prominent members of the art establishment in the UK and the US.

The Breakdown, a painting by the Scottish artist John Bulloch Souter, appeared at the 158th Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition in 1926. It showed a naked white woman dancing, as if entranced, to music played by a black musician (see Pl 1). Commentaries were extensive and international. Some were positive but many more were adverse and the image soon became controversial. The British government intervened quickly, taking the highly unusual step of requiring the Royal Academy to remove the work from public display, which happened on 8 May. Souter subsequently destroyed it but retained preparatory sketches from which he painted a very similar version in 1962. The principle focus here is the 1926 version.

‘The magic of money’ is William Hogarth’s own phrase, appearing in his print The South Sea Scheme (Pl 1). Hogarth the social activist is best remembered for his attacks on alcoholism in Gin Lane and Beer Street, his concern for animals, and for his charity work for the Foundling Hospital in London. It is less well known that he worried throughout his working life about gambling and its consequences for all classes. Charles Dillon, the historian of the aftermath of the Revolution of 1688, and a student of the ‘culture of risk’ in 18th-century Britain, sees its triple legacy as freedom, knowledge, and – above all – risk, which manifested itself through gaming and gambling. It was a matter of prolonged concern for Hogarth.

A sketch by William Blake (1757–1827) after Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam (Pl 1) has been relocated following the death of its previous owner, the mid-century British artist George Hooper (1910–1994), in 1994. The drawing originates from the collection of John Linnell (1792–1882) and was purchased at auction in 1918 by TR Hooper, George Hooper’s grandfather. Inherited via Joyce Katherine Hooper MBE, Blake’s Adam has since been moved from Surrey to London, where it now resides in the dining room of her great-nephew, the conductor and art collector Chris Gayford. The study is drawn on the verso of an early version of one of the Dante illustrations, a depiction of Minos (Pl 2). Though Butlin does not propose a date for either drawing, it is likely that both sides were completed between 1824 and 1827, when Blake was working on the Dante commission.[1]