- 322
Richard Wilson, R.A. 1714-1782
bidding is closed
Description
- Richard Wilson, R.A.
- A farmhouse near the villa mellini on monte mario, Rome
pencil heightened with black chalk, unframed
Provenance
William Legge, 2nd Earl of Dartmouth (1731-1801);
by descent to William Walter Legge, 5th Earl of Dartmouth,
His sale, London, Christie's, 29th January 1954, lot 28;
bt Agnew's;
Wing Commander J.D. Higginson, until 2001
Exhibited
Norwich, Castle Museum, Eighteenth Century Italy and the Grand Tour, 1958, no.57
Literature
Sir Brinsley Ford, 'The Dartmouth Collection of Drawings by Richard Wilson,' Burlington Magazine, Dec 1948, p. 345
Catalogue Note
This drawing is one of a series commissioned by William Legge, the 2nd Earl of Dartmouth (1731-1801) in 1754. The Dartmouth set of drawings are the most important group of the artist's finished compositions on paper.
Originally numbering sixty eight, the drawings were much admired by connoisseurs towards the end of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century, including William Lock of Norbury, John Hoppner and Joseph Farington. There was a group of twenty views in the Environs of Rome, mentioned in a letter by Thomas Jenkins to Lord Dartmouth on 1st June 1754, of which nineteen are recorded.
The Dartmouth drawings are distinguished by their white mount with lilac wash border. Of these important drawings, Hoppner wrote, 'they were such as the Greeks would have made & put all others at a distance' (The Farington Diary, ed. James Grieg, 1924, vol. III, p. 242), and Farington himself was almost certainly referring to them when he wrote that they 'had all the qualities of his [Wilson's] pictures except the colour' (see, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, Exhibition of the Works of Richard Wilson, 1936, p. 12).
The collection of drawings were only re-discovered in a cupboard at the Earl of Dartmouth's seat, Patshull House, Staffordshire in 1948. Of the sixty eight drawings, only twenty-five are traced.
Originally numbering sixty eight, the drawings were much admired by connoisseurs towards the end of the eighteenth and early years of the nineteenth century, including William Lock of Norbury, John Hoppner and Joseph Farington. There was a group of twenty views in the Environs of Rome, mentioned in a letter by Thomas Jenkins to Lord Dartmouth on 1st June 1754, of which nineteen are recorded.
The Dartmouth drawings are distinguished by their white mount with lilac wash border. Of these important drawings, Hoppner wrote, 'they were such as the Greeks would have made & put all others at a distance' (The Farington Diary, ed. James Grieg, 1924, vol. III, p. 242), and Farington himself was almost certainly referring to them when he wrote that they 'had all the qualities of his [Wilson's] pictures except the colour' (see, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, Exhibition of the Works of Richard Wilson, 1936, p. 12).
The collection of drawings were only re-discovered in a cupboard at the Earl of Dartmouth's seat, Patshull House, Staffordshire in 1948. Of the sixty eight drawings, only twenty-five are traced.