Richard Wilson, R.A.

View on Hounslow Heath

Auction Closed

January 27, 09:38 PM GMT

Estimate

40,000 - 60,000 USD

Lot Details

Description

Property from a Distinguished Private Collection

Richard Wilson, R.A.

Penegoes, Powys 1713/14 - 1782 Colomendy, Clwyd

View on Hounslow Heath

monogrammed lower left (the R reversed and in compendium with W): RW

oil on canvas

canvas: 31¾ by 25⅝ in.; 80.6 by 65.1 cm.

framed: 38 by 31¾ in.; 96.5 by 80.6 cm.

H. Pritchard Gordon, Esq.;
His sale, London, Christie's, 1 May 1925, lot 113 (to Agnew);
With Thos. Agnew & Sons, Ltd., London;
With Charles Nicholls and Son, Manchester, 1928;
Private Collection, France;
By whom anonymously sold, London, Sotheby's, 9 July 1986, lot 73;
With Richard L. Feigen & Co., New York;
Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, 8 June 2007, lot 250.

W.G. Constable, Richard Wilson, London 1953, under cat. no. 39b, p. 178;
M. Davies, National Gallery Catalogues: The British School, London 1959, p. 105;
J. Hayes, "An Unknown Drawing of Hounslow Heath," in The Burlington Magazine 106, no. 736 (July 1964), p. 339;
P. Spencer-Longhurst, et al., Richard Wilson: Online Catalogue Raisonné, cat. no. P131B, accessed November 21, 2022.

(Possibly) London, Royal Academy, 1770, cat. no. 203;
London, Thos. Agnew & Sons, Exhibition of English Landscapes, November - December 1926, cat. no. 20;
New York, Richard L. Feigen & Co., Richard Wilson and the British Arcadia, 29 April - 25 June 2010, no. 12.

Richard Wilson, one of the leading classical landscapists of eighteenth-century England, depicted this view of Hounslow Heath on at least four occasions.¹Unlike the painter’s earlier British landscapes that featured culturally significant sites in an Italianate manner, this work illustrates the water meadows beside the River Crane just outside of London. Wilson rendered the rural landscape with a naturalism and straightforward sensibility in the manner of seventeenth-century Dutch painters. Such an image, glorifying the humble origins of English society, would have appealed to urban, middle-class collectors.

Of the four versions of Hounslow Heath, the present work most closely resembles what was considered by Constable, the author of the Wilson monograph, to be the prime version, commissioned by Tom Davies, the Bloomsbury bookseller, and now in the Tate Gallery, London (inv. no. 4458).

This work has been fully accepted as an autograph Wilson since 1986, when it was cleaned by Alexander Dunlace, the chief conservator at the Tate Gallery, London, who discovered the artist’s monogram, lower left.

¹Two versions are in the Tate London (inv. no. 5842, inv. no. 4458) and one is in a private collection, England.