Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg

Anonymous sale, Christie's, London, 21 January 1927, lot 16;

Private Collection, Sweden, in the 1970s;

His sale, Sotheby's, London, 16 July 1975, lot 13 (sold 850£).

O. Lefeuvre, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg, 1740-1812, Paris 2012, p. 271, no. 203.

Although he had tried out almost all painting genres, Philippe-Jacques de Loutherbourg (1740–1812) is chiefly known as a painter of landscapes and marine scenes, fields in which he excelled, bringing him prestige at a very young age. Approved and then accepted into the Académie de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris in 1767, he exhibited a very large number of paintings at the Salons du Louvre between 1763 and 1771, the year he moved to London.

The present painting, which depicts a picturesque landscape inspired by the Lake District, which Loutherbourg had visited in the 1780s, is entirely typical of the works he painted in his English period. They are sometimes difficult to date, since the artist’s style changed little over the years. While it is comparable with Loutherbourg’s works in the mid-1780s, it could be slightly later and date to the beginning of the next decade.