A large portrait of Provost Samuel Leckie by William A. Donnelly 1901

A large portrait of Provost Samuel Leckie as he was presented to Queen Victoria in 1897, William A. Donnelly, 1901, gouache and watercolour showing a large bearded man in court dress of a black coat, knee breeches, stockings and elaborately ruffled shirt and cuffs, with silver-buckled shoes, holding a bicorne and a sword, standing before a balustrade with a park landscape receding into the distance behind, within a gild frame, signed, dated 1901 and inscribed ‘Provost Leckie as he was presented to Her Most Gracious Majesty THE QUEEN at Buckingham Palace. London, 1897.’

Provenance:  A private European collection

Footnote: This interesting and extremely large scale portrait is a new addition to the small corpus of known works by the Victorian artist William A. Donnelly (1847-1905).  It depicts the Provost, essentially the ceremonial Mayor, Samuel Leckie (d. 1912).  The Leckie family were ironmongers by profession and hailed originally from Montrose.  However, Samuel seems to have spent most of his career in and around the Glasgow and Clydebank area.  He was Chief Magistrate and served the public in many other capacities for a period of 25 years.  He is perhaps best remembered today for his extraordinarily generous donation, in 1907, of a grand 18 foot high cast iron drinking fountain to Dalmuir Park in Clydebank, where it still stands today.

Our painting states that it depicts the Provost as he was presented to Her Majesty at Buckingham Palace in 1897. Given the date, this is highly likely to have formed part of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee celebrations that year with various civic dignitaries visiting the monarch to pay their respects on behalf of their towns and cities.  It is likely that the sitter’s importance in civic society, and the sheer size of the piece, means it was commissioned by his ex-council to hang in their chambers or another civic building.  As will be discussed below,

William A. Donnelly (1847-1905) came from an artistic family.  His grandfather and great grandfather had been in the printers and his father was a pattern designer who ran a successful fashion business in Glasgow.  Indeed, Donelly was described by the journalist and art critic, Neil Munro, as a man whose ‘sartorial splendour made him in Glasgow the most conspicuous artist of his time’.  This gave Willam junior access to Royal circles, and he received a number of commissions from the Royal family.  His fame increased beyond Scotland with his appointment, as Scottish correspondent, to the Illustrated London News.  Sadly, Donnelly developed an interest in archaeology which was to prove his undoing.  In 1898 he discovered what he thought was an early settlement on the banks of the Clyde, complete with what he believed to be authentic carved artefacts.  These were dismissed as fakes by some eminent experts of the time and, although there is no suggestion that Donnelly himself made the fakes, the repercussions led to ill health and, according to his son, ultimately to his early death.  Very few paintings by Donnelly survive and those that do are primarily in two public collections; the Glasgow Museums Service and, most importantly in this context, the West Dunbartonshire Council Fine Art Collection.  The author Alastair Mitchell owns a large watercolour and one of the artist’s sketchbooks.