Budleigh prints in sale

Two antique engravings of Budleigh Salterton will attract keen interest from local collectors at a Silver, Collectors and General Sale in Exmouth on Monday 7 October.

The Museum’s Antiquities Consultant and auctioneer Piers Motley-Nash, owner of Bicton Street Auction Rooms, describes both examples as original and in good condition, framed and glazed.

Lot 297, shown above, is a tinted engraving published in 1822 by John Wallis’ Royal Marine Library, noted for his publications and topographical prints of Sidmouth.  The Library, first opened to the public by Wallis on 20 June 1809, was one of the first Regency houses to be built on Sidmouth’s seafront and was a popular meeting-place for summer visitors. Wallis himself was a bookseller, publisher and business associate of the celebrated London print shop owner Rudolph Ackerman.  The Royal Marine Library is now the Bedford Hotel.

The second item, Lot 296 shown above, is described as a tinted engraving after C.F. Williams and dedicated to Lady Rolle by the R.B. Paine Library, Salterton.  The artist is described by Sidmouth antiquary Peter Orlando Hutchinson as an old friend of his: the two used to go out sketching together as boys. In a Journal entry for Monday 12 September, POH records that he drove to Beer to see Williams who had 'some beautiful watercolours'.

 

Lady Rolle (1794-1885) in her peerage robes. Portrait by Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830)

As for Lady Rolle, the second wife of John Rolle, 1st Baron Rolle (1750-1842), she was born Louisa Trefusis and was celebrated for creating the grand landscaped gardens at Bicton. An American visitor in 1864 described her as a remarkable woman, without equal or like in England. “She is a female rival of Alexander the Great. The world that the Grecian conqueror subjugated was a small affair in space compared with the two hemispheres which this English lady has taken by the hair of the head and bound to her chair of state. It seems to have been her ambition for nearly half a century to do what was never done before by man or woman in filling her great park and gardens with a collection of trees and shrubs that should be to them what the British Museum is to the relics of antiquity and the literature of all ages".

Viewing for the sale is on Friday 4 October from 9.30 am - 5.00 pm, and Saturday 5 October from 9.30 am - 1.30 pm. The sale itself begins at 10.00 am the following Monday.  Click on http://www.piersmotleyauctions.co.uk/ for more information on Bicton Street Auction Rooms.