Eyre Crowe (1824-1910)

Medium: oil on canvas

Size: 160 x 200 cm; 63 x 78¾ in [2008 measurements]; 54 x 72 inches [1899 measurements]

Exhibited: Royal Academy, 1846

Original caption:

“Thus farre the Bishop proceeded in his Diary, which had an unexpected period put into it, being seized by Master Prynne in the Tower, May 31, 1643.” Vide Prynne’s Breviate of Laud’s Diary

This was the first picture exhibited by Eyre Crowe at the Royal Academy exhibition, two years after his arrival in London, at the age of 21.

This painting shows a scene set in the mid-17th century. One man in a bedroom, wearing clerical clothes, is interrogated by a man wearing a long black cloak, who is brandishing something which had been concealed under the clothing of the cleric. Two soldiers are in attendance, one of whom is preventing a fifth man from entering the room.

Called ‘Scene Historique’, this picture was auctioned at Hotel de Ventes VanDerKindere auctioneers, Brussels, on 8 May 2007, fetching EUR 3,500.

Called ‘Soldiers Meeting’, it was auctioned at Sothebys, New Bond Street, London, on 6 March 2008 (Sale L08133 ‘British and Continental Pictures’, Lot 43), where it sold for £4,000. A colour image of the painting was published in the sale catalogue and can be seen online. The painting is signed and dated 1870, but the image matches very closely the description of 1846’s Master Prynne.

According to Eyre Crowe in his diary for 1899, the painting was chosen by an Art Union prizeholder in 1846. It came up at auction in 1899. The purchaser, a Mr John A. King of Liverpool, wrote to Crowe to enquire whether he had painted two pictures of the same subject, having noticed that the one he had bought was dated 1870. Crowe believed that the date of 1870 ‘I suppose has been forged’. Mr King’s art dealer father subsequently offered it for sale for £60.

It was noted in the reviews of the Royal Academy exhibition in 1846 only by Crowe’s friend William Makepeace Thackeray, who was at the time an art critic and journalist at the Morning Chronicle, and in the pages of the Daily News, which was edited by Crowe’s father Eyre Evans Crowe. Thackeray had owed his position at the Morning Chronicle to Crowe’s father and the long association between the two families must suggest that he included a notice of young Crowe’s picture more out of friendship than artistic merit. The reviews below should therefore be taken with a pinch of salt:

Morning Chronicle, 11 May 1846:

Mr Crowe, a new exhibitor we believe, has a picture, 534, Prynne searching Laud’s pockets, which promises very well. The puritan and the bishop are capital figures, the head of the latter particularly fine. The artist is as yet deficient in pictorial dexterity, but the picture has energy, good drawing, and character.

Daily News, 14 May 1846:

Mr. Crowe – a new exhibitor, we believe – has a picture of “Master Prynne rifling the pockets of Archbishop Laud”, the general effect of which is artist-like and pleasing.