Master of the Blue Landscapes

Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), London (L.2445);

William Esdaile (1758-1837), London (L.2617, and his numbering and initials in brown ink, verso: 1936 WE);

'Carpenter';

'Hewlett' (both according to 1922 sale catalogue),

sale, London, Sotheby’s, 28 November 1922, lot 25;

William Bateson (1861-1926), London (L.2604a),

sale, London, Sotheby’s, 23 April 1929, lot 139;

Private collection, until 2002,

whence acquired by Diane A. Nixon

M. Roethlisberger, 'Drawings around Claude, Part I: A group of sixty Grimaldesque Drawings', Master Drawings, III, 1965, p. 377, no. 24

This atmospheric Italian landscape belongs to a group of drawings on blue paper that were traditionally attributed to Claude Lorrain (1600-1682). In 1965, however, Marcel Roethlisberger convincingly proposed that they were all by another, unknown hand, and that the colour notes, in French, that are inscribed on some of the sheets suggest that the artist was probably another Frenchman working in Rome in about 1650.