Sawrey Gilpin

Sawrey Gilpin was born on 30 October 1733 at Scaleby, near Carlisle, Cumberland, son of Captain John Bernard Gilpin, a soldier and amateur landscape painter. As a boy, Gilpin learned to draw from his father. His elder brother was the Reverend William Gilpin, later a prominent writer and theorist of the Picturesque.

Around 1749, in his teens, Gilpin was sent to London to apprentice under the marine painter Samuel Scott in Covent Garden. He remained with Scott for roughly nine years, first as an apprentice and then as an assistant, before setting out on his own around 1758. No record survives of any formal academy enrollment or degree; his training was entirely studio based. Turning away from Scott's marine subjects, Gilpin devoted himself to animals, especially horses, and attracted the patronage of William Augustus, Duke of Cumberland, who commissioned portraits of his racehorses at Newmarket.

Gilpin exhibited with the Society of Artists in Great Britain from 1762 to 1783 and served as the Society's President from 1774. He began exhibiting at the Royal Academy in 1768 and continued to show work there every year until his death. He was elected an Associate of the Royal Academy in 1795 and a full Royal Academician in 1797. In 1759 he married Elizabeth Broom, with whom he had six children, including William Sawrey Gilpin, who became a watercolorist and later a landscape gardener. In his final years, Gilpin lived with his daughters at Brompton, Middlesex, now part of London, where he died on 8 March 1807.

Gilpin's standing rests less on written criticism, little of which survives in verifiable, attributable form from his own period, than on the institutional record he built over his career. Continuous annual exhibition at the Royal Academy from 1768 until his death in 1807, alongside the presidency of the Society of Artists in 1774 and Royal Academy membership from 1797, mark him as a figure whose peers and institutions consistently ranked him among the foremost animal and sporting painters of his generation. He is generally discussed as a contemporary counterpart to George Stubbs in the painting of horses, and as part of the current that carried sporting portraiture toward the more dramatic, Romantic treatment of animals taken up by later painters such as James Ward.

Gilpin's market is thin, and no comprehensive public sale record could be confirmed. The highest price identified in available auction records is GBP 80,500, paid at Sotheby's in London in December 2013 for A Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in a Landscape. Other documented sales, at smaller UK auction houses, appear to sit well below that figure, though exact prices for those lots could not be independently verified. There is no continuous public sale record dense enough to support a reliable price index, and a higher, unrecorded result cannot be ruled out.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Sawrey Gilpin, so attribution and dating depend on Royal Academy and Society of Artists exhibition records, museum curatorial files, and the cataloguing practices of the auction houses that periodically bring his work to market. Public sales are infrequent and unevenly priced; the highest confirmed result is GBP 80,500, paid at Sotheby's London in December 2013 for A Cavalier King Charles Spaniel in a Landscape. Collectors should treat that result as the best documented data point rather than a settled record, since auction activity for this artist is too sparse to confirm an all time high with certainty, and should weight provenance and exhibition history heavily given the absence of a catalogue raisonne.