Hendrik Frans van Lint, called Lo Studio

Possibly acquired by Thomas Pelham, 1st Earl of Chichester (1728–1805), or by his son, Thomas, 2nd Earl of Chichester (1756–1826), in Rome in the second half of the 18^th century;

Thence by descent within the family at Stanmer House, Sussex, where recorded in an inventory of 1905 as hanging in the Red Drawing Room (see Literature);

Whence acquired by an English private collection, c. 1940;

Thence by descent until anonymously sold ('The Property of a Gentleman'), London, Sotheby’s, 8 July 1999, lot 79, for £400,000;

With Richard Green, London;

From whom acquired in July 1999.

Recorded in the 1905 inventory of the contents of Stanmer House, East Sussex Record Office, Brighton, MS CHR 29/6, probably p. 238 ('Landscapes Orizante - figures Pompeio' [sic]).

Hendrik Frans van Lint was one of the most accomplished and sought-after landscape painters working in Rome in the first half of the 18^th century. A native of Antwerp, he moved to the Eternal City circa 1710, where he soon earned himself the nickname ‘Lo Studio’, due to the painstaking precision with which he rendered both figures and architecture, and he is often seen to sign with this name, as here. These beautifully preserved paintings rank amongst Van Lint's most accomplished ‘Claudian’ landscapes, evoking an arcadian world populated by delicately rendered figures set in an idealised classical landscape. Both works, one of which is dated 1742, were executed by Van Lint in Rome and bear the Italian form of his signature, ‘Enrico’.

These two paintings are the prime versions of slightly larger autograph replicas, painted two years later, with minor differences in the figures and architecture, in the Durazzo Pallavicini Collection, Genova.¹ In his monograph on the artist, Andrea Busiri Vici believes the figures in those paintings to have been executed by a different hand, probably by the same artist who provided the staffage for another pair of paintings by Van Lint, dated 1738 and formerly with Richard Feigen, New York.²

During the 1730s, Van Lint is known to have collaborated with a number of figure painters who provided colourful and imaginative figures for his landscapes, most famously among them was Pompeo Batoni (1708–87), who arrived in Rome in 1727. By the late 1730s, Van Lint became increasingly proficient at adding such figures himself, sometimes based on earlier types supplied by Batoni during their collaborations.³ In this case, the elongated forms and decorative classicism of the figures in the present works do not bear similarities with Batoni’s figural style and recall, more than any other artist, the works of Claude Lorrain (1600–82). It is therefore possible that Van Lint himself chose to paint the figures in a style homogeneous with the landscapes beyond.

Another, slightly smaller version of the Landscape with Venus, Apollo, Cupid, Silenus and other classical figures was sold at Sotheby’s, London, in July 1976.⁴

Note on Provenance

It is likely that these paintings were acquired in Rome in the 18^th century by Thomas Pelham, 1st Earl of Chichester (1728–1805), or by his son, Thomas, 2nd Earl of Chichester (1756–1826), during their respective Grand Tours. The 1st Earl, ‘a very good-natured little man’, is recorded in Rome in January–February 1750,⁵ where he had his portrait painted by Gavin Hamilton (1723–98; current whereabouts unknown).⁶ The 2nd Earl reached Rome for the first time in April 1777, later returning to the city between June and September of that year. Despite finding the Italian people ‘either the most ignorant, or the most artful men than can be seen, & from whose conversation you can not gain any new Idea or Improvement’, he found the country ‘worth the Notice of every Man of reading’.⁷

These landscapes are first recorded in an inventory dated 1905 of the contents of Stanmer House, Sussex, home of the Pelham family since their purchase of the estate in 1712.⁸ They are likely to correspond to paintings of near identical dimensions described as landscapes by Jan Frans van Bloemen and Pompeo Batoni and recorded as hanging in the Red Drawing Room (see Literature); although it is possible that they may in fact be another pair of paintings described as 'Landscape and figures by Vanlint' in the East end of the Drawing Room, these however are of larger dimensions.

The current Roman-pedimented house was built in the 1720s in the Palladian style by French architect Nicholas Dubois (c. 1665–1735) for Henry Pelham (c. 1694–1725) and remained in the family until its sale to Brighton Council in 1947.

We are grateful to Dr Sue Berry for her assistance in clarifying the provenance of this lot.

¹ A. Busiri Vici, Peter, Hendrik e Giacomo Van Lint: Tre pittori di Anversa del '600 e '700 lavorano a Roma, Rome 1987, p. 235, nos 281–82, reproduced.

² Busiri Vici 1987, pp. 230–31, nos 275–76, reproduced in colour.

³ Anthony Clark suggested that Van Lint may have also had recourse to an album of drawings by Batoni for the figures in his paintings; A.M. Clark, Pompeo Batoni, Oxford 1985, p. 54.

⁴ ‘The Property of Mr. V.T. Schaerer of Johannesburg, South Africa’, London, Sotheby’s, 7 July 1976, lot 3.

⁵ J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy 1701–1800, New Haven and London 1997, p. 751.

⁶ B. Cassidy, ‘Gavin Hamilton (1723–1798). His beginnings as an artist informed by an unpublished collection of letters’, in The British Art Journal, Summer 2023, vol. 24, no. 1, p. 86, n. 87.

⁷ Ingamells 1997, p. 752.

⁸ When offered for sale in 1999, these works were described as being recorded in an inventory of Stanmer House dated 1880. We have been unable to trace this reference.