Francis Robert West Sold at Auction Prices

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    • FRANCIS ROBERT WEST (C.1749 - 1809) Half-length portrait, of Mrs Fulke Greville, (c.1724-1789) née Frances Macartney, Black chalk with red pastel highlights on paper, 22.5 cm diameter Contained in a George III carved and giltwood frame with sand
      Oct. 18, 2022

      FRANCIS ROBERT WEST (C.1749 - 1809) Half-length portrait, of Mrs Fulke Greville, (c.1724-1789) née Frances Macartney, Black chalk with red pastel highlights on paper, 22.5 cm diameter Contained in a George III carved and giltwood frame with sand

      Est: €4,000 - €6,000

      FRANCIS ROBERT WEST (C.1749 - 1809) Half-length portrait, of Mrs Fulke Greville, (c.1724-1789) née Frances Macartney, Black chalk with red pastel highlights on paper, 22.5 cm diameter Contained in a George III carved and giltwood frame with sanded gilt insert Provenance: the sitter, and by descent to her daughter Frances Anne (1748-1818) who married John, later 1st Baron Crewe (1742-1829); John, 2nd Baron Crewe (1772-1835); Hungerford, 3rd Baron Crewe FSA (1812-1893) who died unmarried, his heir being his sister whose son; Robert Offley Ashburton Milnes (later Crewe-Milnes) (1858-1945), 2nd Baron Haughton, Viceroy of Ireland, succeeded to the estates of his maternal uncle and was created Earl of Crewe (1895) and Marquess of Crewe (1911) and by descent to his youngest daughter Mary Evelyn Hungerford Crewe-Milnes, Duchess of Roxburghe (1915-2014), from whose estate acquired by the present owner Frances Macartney (1727-1789), one of the finest female Irish poets of the eighteenth century, was the fifth surviving child of James Macartney (1692-1770) MP for Longford and Granard, and Catherine Coote (d. 1731), niece of the 1st Earl of Bellamont. Her father, co-heir of the earls of Longford, inherited half of the Longford estate around Aungier Street in Dublin. Beautiful, and spirited (with Sarah Lennox she was celebrated in Horace Walpole’s 1746 poem, The Beauties), Frances was known for her witty verses and was part of the fast set revolving round Henry Fox. In 1747 she met Fulke Greville (1717-1806), of Wilbury in Wiltshire (more recently home to Miranda Iveagh), then one of the most accomplished young men in society and they eloped on 26 January 1748. Their daughter, Frances Anne (later, after her marriage to John Crewe, a famous Whig hostess and mistress of Sheridan) was christened on 28 November that year. After her marriage Frances ‘confined her writing to satirical and occasional ephemera for the amusement of the fashionable world, but her growing fame piqued her husband, who had assigned her to “the shade”, and she hid her work from him with the exception of her famous poem, the Ode to Indifference, written either in 1756 or in 1757 in Italy’ (Oxford, DNB). The poem, a critique of the cult of sensibility was extraordinary popular indeed, it ‘became as celebrated as Thomas Gray's Elegy’ (ibid). She also started, but never completed, a novel. Frances Greville's god-daughter, the novelist Frances Burney, described her as ‘pedantic, sarcastic, and supercilious’, and capable of alarming ‘the timid and braving the bold, to whom she allowed no quarter’. Hester Thrale, meanwhile, wrote to Dr Johnson that she had ‘a commanding manner & loud voice’ and ‘is said to have formed her manner upon yours’ (Letters of Samuel Johnson, 2.262) – this was not meant as a compliment. With the breakdown of her marriage, exacerbated by the husband’s chronic gambling, Frances moved home to Ireland from 1783 to 1788, under the protection of the Lennox sisters, the Duchess of Leinster and Lady Louisa Conolly (friends from childhood), and her cousins the Longfords of Pakenham Hall (now Tullynally). By 1788 the couple finally separated and she took a house in London where she died on 30 July the following year. Eldest son of Robert West, the influential Dublin artist and teacher, Francis Robert West’s style is distinctive and always charming, although his work is noticeably rare. His conversation pieces are neatly and accurately portrayed in black charcoal, often with a touch of red highlighting. Virtually all of his surviving works are in oval or circular format and he exhibited chalk portraits such as this at the Society of Artists’ shows in Dublin’s William Street.

      Adam's
    • Francis Robert West (1749?-1809)
      May. 14, 2004

      Francis Robert West (1749?-1809)

      Est: £7,000 - £10,000

      Figures sewing in an interior indistinctly inscribed '....shooling' [sic]... West [?] (on a sheet attached to the reverse of the frame) coloured chalks 14 3/4 x 17 in. (37.5 x 43 cm.) in an Irish contemporary green lacquer frame

      Christie's
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