Original drawings for the poems of Robert Burns

Original drawings for the poems of Robert Burns

John Masey Wright, circa 1840

[BURNS, Robert (1759-1796).] WRIGHT, John Masey (1771-1866), artist. Suite of 40 original watercolor and sepia drawings illustrating the poems of Robert Burns and/or other Scottish themes. [N.p., circa 1840.]



Fine suite of original drawings by an accomplished Victorian illustrator. About a third of these drawings were published as engravings in George Virtue\'s edition of Burns\'s works in 1840 and it is from this edition that the artist can be identified. One of the drawings is a self portrait of the artist.



John Masey Wright was a student of the illustrator Thomas Stothard. Early in his career he worked on the famous Piccadilly panoramas and on theater sets. However, he would soon begin exhibiting at the Royal Academy and in 1824 he was elected a member of the Old Watercolourist Society (today the Royal Watercolourist Society). \"But his reputation rests upon his small compositions illustrating Shakespeare and other poets, which were extremely numerous and executed with admirable taste and feeling in the manner of Stothard\" (DNB). Wright was prolific for decades and many thousands of Victorian readers of not just Shakespeare and Burns, but also Scott, Shelley, Cervantes, and others would have encountered his work. However, this collection is the only extensive suite of his drawings that we find in the auction records of Artnet or RBH.



40 drawings by John Masey Wright (unsigned); 15 are captioned in pencil on the versos; each mounted on card, with tissue guards. Various sizes, but mostly 245 x 165mm (small section of soiling to one drawing, minor bowing to mounts). Housed in a custom red morocco clamshell box. Provenance: Sotheby\'s, 24 May 1954, lot 234 - Harry & Virginia Walton (their sale, Bloomsbury New York, 4 April 2009, lot 190).