Sidney Richard Percy

Sidney Richard Percy was born Sidney Richard Percy Williams on 22 March 1822 in London, the son of the landscape painter Edward Williams. He received no formal art school education. His father taught him to paint. One secondary source also states that as a young man he was apprenticed to Thomas Hilliard, a gilder based in Carnaby Street, but this detail does not appear in the Dictionary of National Biography or other standard reference sources and should be treated as unconfirmed. Around the age of twenty he began signing his work "Percy" rather than "Williams," a change made, along with similar changes by several of his painter brothers (who worked as Henry John Boddington and Arthur Gilbert), to distinguish the numerous artist sons of Edward Williams from one another.

He first exhibited at the Royal Academy and the Society of British Artists in 1842, and at the British Institution from 1843. Over the following decades he became a regular and highly visible contributor to all three, showing landscapes of Wales, Scotland, and the Thames valley, along with pastoral scenes of grazing cattle and sheep. His reputation reached a high point in 1854, when Prince Albert purchased his Royal Academy picture "A View of Llyn Dulyn, North Wales" as a gift for Queen Victoria. In 1863 he sent "A View on the Banks of the Thames, After the Storm" to the Paris Salon, where it was well received; a Salon reviewer in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts wrote that "we are happy that Mr. Percy has today deserted Trafalgar Square for the Champs-Elysees." When the Athenaeum ran his obituary in 1886 it described him as "the well-known and popular painter, founder of the so-called School of Barnes," a reference to the informal circle of landscape painters, including several of his brothers, associated with that part of London.

In his later years Percy lived at Woodseat, in Sutton, Surrey. He suffered a serious injury to his knee in a horse-riding accident, and his leg was subsequently amputated. He died at home on 13 April 1886, at age sixty-four, of a heart attack attributed to complications from the amputation surgery; a minority of sources give the date as 16 April 1886, but the Dictionary of National Biography, Tate, and most other major references agree on 13 April. Wikipedia states, in both its English and Russian editions, that he was buried at Beckenham Cemetery in Kent, though this is not corroborated by other biographical sources. His remaining pictures and sketches were sold at Christie, Manson and Woods in London on 27 November 1886.

In his own time, Percy was, in the words of the Dictionary of National Biography, an artist whose works "were at one time very popular," and he was described by the Athenaeum on his death as the "founder of the so-called School of Barnes." His 1863 submission to the Paris Salon drew a favorable notice in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts. Modern dealer and auction-house writing continues to describe him as one of the most successful landscape painters of the Victorian market, citing his exhibition record of roughly seventy works each at the Royal Academy and the Society of British Artists, and around fifty at the British Institution, alongside the 1854 purchase by Prince Albert for Queen Victoria as evidence of his standing among contemporaries.

Percy's best documented auction result is "Loch Lomond," which sold for GBP 35,200 at Christie's London on 2 June 1989 in a Victorian Pictures sale. A later GBP 70,000 sale of the same picture, reported for 6 October 1993, was a gallery transaction rather than a public auction and is not treated here as an auction record. More recent public sales sit well below the 1989 figure; a work sold at Stroud's Auction Rooms in Gloucester on 10 January 2018 realized GBP 17,700, and many of his smaller, more routine landscapes trade at auction in the low thousands of pounds or dollars. His work is currently offered commercially through Haynes Fine Art, London and the Cotswolds, though no source identifies an exclusive representing gallery for this historical artist.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Percy, so attribution rests on the historical exhibition record, the Dictionary of National Biography, and cataloguing by auction houses and specialist dealers such as Rehs Galleries and Haynes Fine Art. Because he worked within a family of landscape painters whose members frequently painted similar Welsh, Scottish, and Thames-side subjects under different names, works by Percy are sometimes confused with those of his brothers and should be checked carefully against signature and provenance. His market is active but thin: the 1989 Christie's result for "Loch Lomond" remains an outlier against a broader pattern of modest, steady prices at regional and specialist sales, so any single result should be read in the context of the specific work's size, subject, and condition rather than as a benchmark for the artist as a whole.