John Linnell

William Agnew, London (commissioned from the artist in 1857) 
Spink, London
Salander-O'Reilly Galleries, New York
Sale: Sotheby's, London, 14 November 1990, lot 124
Purchased at the above sale by the present owner

David Linnell, Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: The Life of John Linnell, Lewes, 1994, pp. 266, 236, no. 22(b), p. 366, illustrated
P & D Colnaghi & Co Ltd., A Loan Exhibition of Drawings, Watercolours and Paintings by John Linnell and his Circle, exh. cat., London, 1973, no. 18, cited 

Linnell shared lodgings between 1809 and 1811 with his close friend and mentor William Mulready in the village of Kensington Gravel Pits, an area of west London located at the junction of present-day Bayswater Road and Kensington Church Street, now known as Notting Hill Gate. The village was named after the quarries which lay to the south, where gravel to supply the building trade in London’s West End had been excavated for at least three centuries. The village was a pleasant haven of fresh air and sweeping rural views and Linnell and Mulready joined a thriving group of artists living there, including Augustus Wall Callcott and Thomas Webster. It was their teacher John Varley who had suggested that Linnell and Mulready should ‘go to Nature for everything’ and they frequently sketched together in the local area. Mulready painted A Gravel Pit in 1807–8 (private collection) and later The Mall, Kensington Gravel Pits, 1811–12 and Near the Mall, Kensington Gravel Pits, 1812–13 (both Victoria and Albert Museum, London). Linnell made a series of sketches of the quarries and brick-kilns in 1812, culminating in the large painting Kensington Gravel Pits painted in the same year (Tate) and exhibited as The Gravel Pits at the British Institution in 1813. Critical response was mixed: ‘I was told that Flaxman [John Flaxman, at the time professor of sculpture at the Royal Academy] spoke of this picture very favourably at some party. It was well placed but not purchased.’ (Quoted in P.&D. Colnaghi, A Loan Exhibition of Drawings, Watercolours and Paintings by John Linnell and his Circle, London, 1973, cat. 18.) It was an unusual and bold painting, a departure from the picturesque landscape tradition. It depicts a naturalistic setting of workers toiling in the landscape rather than a romanticised vision of a rural idyll. For some critics the subject was too modern but this did not deter Linnell from painting further scenes of the pits, including one dated 1846 (Harris Museum in Preston) and a small sketch (Christie’s, London, 26 November 2002, lot 71). The present picture was commissioned in 1857 by the art dealer William Agnew and was seen in an almost complete state in Linnell's studio in March that year by the collector William Wethered who offered the artist £350 for it. Linnell honoured his commitment to Agnew and in a letter to the dealer dated 7 March 1857 he wrote; ‘The Gravel Pits is finished and in it I have endeavoured to beat my former self’ (quoted in David Linnell, Blake, Palmer, Linnell and Co.: The Life of John Linnell, Lewes, 1994, p. 266).