Draft:Goose Girl

The Goose Girl

It is one of the National Gallery of Ireland’s best-known and most popular paintings, but for over 25 years The Goose Girl was wrongly attributed to the Irish artist William Leech. In 1996 the gallery admitted it had made a mistake and The Goose Girl was actually the work of a little-known British painter, Stanley Royle. What finally settled the argument was the appearance of a remarkably similar painting by Royle, entitled Spring Morning Amongst the Bluebells, at an auction in London in April 1995. After it was sold, the painting disappeared into a private collection in the US. Just over two years ago Spring Morning Amongst the Bluebells was spotted by Tony Duncan, a Laois solicitor and prominent art collector, at an auction in Windsor, Connecticut. He bought it, shipped it to Ireland, and had it cleaned, glazed, and reframed by Liam Slattery. Mr Duncan then offered the painting on loan to the National Gallery, with the idea of it being shown alongside The Goose Girl, allowing the Irish public to compare and contrast. This weekend the Royles have been reunited in a special exhibition in the Millennium Wing of the gallery. The two paintings are now exhibited side by side, Mr Dubcan’s is the ‘mother’ picture, having been painted first. Seeing them together just brings home what a good artist Royle was. He was a master of depicting dappled sunlight. Spring Morning Amongst the Bluebells was painted in 1913, about a decade before The Goose Girl. The British painter held on to it throughout his life, probably because the model for the woman in the painting was his wife Lily. When he died in 1961, his family kept the painting for the next 34 years, only putting it for sale in 1995 in Christie’s. A London art dealer bought it, and then resold it quite quickly to a client in the US. It was never on public display and never seen again until put up for sale in January 2022 when it was acquired by Mr Duncan. Thinking it was by an established Irish artist The Goose Girl was bought by the National Gallery from an art dealer in 1970, two years after Leech died. Doubts about the attribution were first raised in the 1980s by experts including Bruce Arnold and Dominic Milmo-Penny. One reason why it had been attributed to Leech was a label pasted to the frame inscribed with the letters WL. However a trade stamp on the back showed the canvas had been supplied by ¬Hibbert Brothers of Sheffield, a city Leech never visited, but where Royle lived and bought his art materials. When The Goose Girl was included in a Leech retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery in 1996, Arnold, who died earlier this year, discovered the remains of a signature on the canvas, identifying the letters “ley” and “le” part of the same signature on the Spring Morning picture. Raymond Keaveney, the then director of the gallery, finally put an end to the ongoing controversy by issuing a statement saying the discovery of the remnants of the signature cleared the way for a definitive reattribution of the painting to Stanley Royle (1888-1961)”. At the current mini-exhibition of Royle’s two works in the National Gallery, the sign beside The Goose Girl says he made many paintings of the Sheffield countryside, and the setting is Whiteley Woods. No mention is made of the earlier attribution to Leech. Instead the curator says Royle “has applied paint in distinct touches to convey a sense of dappled light”. Royle’s bold use of complementary colours, like orange and purple, is characteristic of post-impressionism. The sign beside Spring Morning Amongst the Bluebells points out that Lily Goulding, who married Royle in 1914, modelled for the figure in the painting. Throughout Royle’s long career, art critics praised his ability to capture the effects of light falling upon grass and snow,” it adds. Dr Caroline Campbell, director of the National Gallery of Ireland, said: “We are delighted to offer visitors the chance to experience the beauty of Stanley Royle’s works, Spring Morning Amongst the Bluebells (1913), which is on loan and is now on display alongside The Goose Girl (c.1921) in Rooms 1-5 of the Millennium Wing. “This special display helps us showcase art in a way that makes the gallery an exciting place to encounter art. We would like to thank the generous lenders, AJ and Ann Duncan, and highlight the timeless charm of Royle’s art.”