Important Old Master Paintings and European Works of Art Including Property of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery

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Lot 250
  • 250

Richard Wilson, R.A. Penegoes, Powys 1713/14 - 1782 Colomendy, Clwyd

Estimate
40,000 - 60,000 USD
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Description

  • Richard Wilson, R.A.
  • Hounslow Heath
  • signed with monogram lower right RW (R is backwards and in compendium with W)
  • oil on canvas

Provenance

H. Pritchard Gordon, Esq.;
His sale, London, Christie's, May 1, 1925, lot 113, for £120.15 to Agnew;
With Thos. Agnew & Sons, Ltd.;
C. Nicholls and Sons, 1928;
Private Collection, France;
By whom anonymously sold, London, Sotheby's, July 9, 1986, lot 73, for £7,600 to Feigen;
With Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York, inv. no. 17498-C.  

Exhibited

(Possibly) London, Royal Academy, 1770, cat. no. 203;
London, Thos. Agnew & Sons Galleries, Exhibition of English Landscapes, November - December 1926, cat. no. 38, titled "Hounslow Heath." 

Literature

W. G. Constable, Richard Wilson, London 1953, pp. 178, under plate no. 39b, pp. 274, 296;
J. Hayes, "An Unknown Drawing of Hounslow Heath," in The Burlington Magazine, vol. 106, July 1964, p. 339.

Catalogue Note

Of the four versions of Hounslow Heath, the present work most closely resembles what was considered by Constable, the author of the Wilson monograph, to be the primary version, commissioned by Tom Davies, the Bloomsbury bookseller, and now in the Tate Gallery, London (no. 4458).    

The scene depicts the marshland of the River Crane as it runs through Hounslow Heath.  Wilson presumably went to the area whilst visiting his friend and patron, Williams Chambers, who, by 1765, had purchased the mansion of Whitten Place (formerly a favorite residence of Archibald, 3rd Duke of Argyll), at the edge of the Heath.  In the present work, the artist uses variations of light and shades of greens, blues and yellows to create a sense of breadth and depth in this sun-dappled bucolic landscape.

This work has been fully accepted as an autograph Wilson since 1986, when it was cleaned by Alexander Dunlace, the chief conservator at the Tate Gallery, London, who discovered the artist’s monogram, lower left.