Oil on canvas, 'Landscape - Cottage by a Brook with a Boy on a White Horse', Patrick Nasmyth, ca. 1800-1831

A small part of a cottage is visible on the left, outside of which is a clothes-line and a broken fence. A pollard tree is situated, left-of-centre, and a boy on a white horse beside a brook, is placed foreground, right. Behind them is seated a man with a dog. Above is a blue sky with white and mauve clouds.

Bequeathed by John M. Parsons

Bequeathed by John M. Parsons, 1870
John Meeson Parsons (1798-1870), art collector, was born in Newport, Shropshire. He later settled in London, and became a member of the stock exchange. His interest in railways led to his election as an associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1839, and he was director or chairman of two railway companies between 1843 and 1848. Much of his time however was spent collecting pictures and works of art. In his will he offered his collection of mostly German and Dutch schools to the National Gallery (which selected only three works) and to the Department of Science and Art at South Kensington, later the Victoria and Albert Museum. The South Kensington Museum acquired ninety-two oil paintings and forty-seven watercolours. A number of engravings were also left to the British Museum.

Patrick Nasmyth’s favourite tree was said to have been the dwarf oak, although he was good at rendering mixed wooded effects as seen here. James Nasmyth wrote that for his brother Patrick, ‘The immediate neighbourhood of London abounded with the most charming and appropriate subjects for his pencil. These consisted of rural “bits” of the most picturesque but homely description – the decayed pollard trees and old moss-grown orchards, combined with cottages and farm-houses in the most “paintable” state of decay, with tangled hedges and neglected fences, overrun with vegetation clinging to them with all the careless grace of nature’ (Peter Johnson and Ernle Money, The Nasmyth Family of Painters, 1977, p.31). This painting exemplifies the naturalism observed by Nasmyth’s brother, while also reflecting Nasmyth’s absorption of 17th-century, Dutch landscape painting, particularly the work of Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9-82) and Meindert Hobbema (1638-1709).

This painting reflects Nasmyth’s penchant for painting ramshackle cottages and farmhouses in picturesque settings of overgrown vegetation. It also reflects his absorption of 17th-century Dutch landscape, particularly Ruisdael and Hobbema.

575-1870