Work of local artist Frederick Schultz Smith is rarely available to buy
Dominic Cox, head of art at auctioneers David Duggleby, with F.S. Smith’s view of the South End with work taking place on the ‘New Pier’ in Hull(Image: davidduggleby.com)
Hull in the late Victorian period was a city of gas lights, cobbled streets and horse-drawn trams – all faithfully recorded by a quite remarkable local artist. The precociously talented Frederick Schultz Smith was just a teenager when he did his first pencil sketch of a city street in the 1870s.
He would go on sketching the city for the next half a century, a familiar sight positioned on street corners or in doorways, invariably working with lightning speed. The result was a unique record of Hull at a time of great change in the city, a time when many older buildings and streets were disappearing – with even more to be lost in the future.
Today, most of Smith’s work is held in the city’s public collections – hundreds of drawings, sketches and watercolours – but some have remained in private hands. It is four of those that are to go under the hammer in an online auction on Thursday, April 23.
The monochrome watercolour and ink drawings include the reconstruction of the “New Pier”, a view sketched from the water; Posterngate and the astonishing almshouses with the colossal figure of Oceanus still in place, and views of Savile Street and Osborne Street in the days when they were serviced by single track horse-drawn trams.
Dominic Cox, head of art at auctioneers David Duggleby, said: “Smith described himself as an ‘architectural artist’ a description that tells us that the accuracy of his drawings and sketches was important, both to him and to his original clients – historians, collectors, newspapers and postcard sellers.”
Dominic said: “They are wonderful views of the city as it once was, pictures that enable us to make a comparison between then and now. Absolutely fascinating!”
The Smith collection is to be sold in three lots in Dugglebys Affordable Art Sale on Thursday. It is an online automated timed auction that is scheduled to start at 3pm.
Other paintings of local interest in the auction include “Toilers of the Deep”, an atmospheric watercolour depiction of a Hull trawler at sea by William Minshall Birchall (1884-1941), an American-born artist who became a renowned painter of British marine subjects.
The catalogue is available on the firm’s website at davidduggleby.com
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