Unknown artist, Britain

Catalogue entry

N02982 Classical Landscape with Mountains c.1720–40

Oil on canvas 356×457 (14×18)
? Bequeathed by Richard and Catherine Jones
Garnons to the National Gallery 1854; transferred to the Tate Gallery 1949
PROVENANCE ...;? Richard and Catherine Jones Garnons at Colomendy by 1854
LITERATURE Davies 1946, p.181 as ‘ascribed to Wilson’; W.G. Constable, Richard Wilson, 1953, pp.105, 129–31

The painting is identified by a late nineteenth-century inscription in ink on the stretcher as coming from the ‘Garnons Bequest 1854 as a Wilson’. The bequest consisted of sixteen paintings from Colomendy in Wales, where Richard Wilson retired in old age. As the paintings were not individually listed until some years later, it is not always certain which paintings actually formed part of the bequest, but N02982 appears to have been inventoried in The Return of the Pictures Acquired by the National Gallery up to 1860 as a ‘Classical Landscape’ by Wilson. This would not now be considered a possible attribution, and Martin Davies's description of it as ‘a Lambert-like imitation of Poussin’ is closer to the mark as the painting seems to be by an unidentifed hand of George Lambert's generation or earlier. It was also catalogued in 1929 as ‘Roman School 18th Century’.

Published in:
Elizabeth Einberg and Judy Egerton, The Age of Hogarth: British Painters Born 1675-1709, Tate Gallery Collections, II, London 1988

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