Oil Painting, 'Landscape with Waterfall', style of Adam Pynacker, 19th century

A rocky wooded landscape with waterfall and distant hills

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend

Bequeathed by Rev. Chauncy Hare Townshend, 1868

Ref : Parkinson, Ronald, Catalogue of British Oil Paintings 1820-1860. Victoria & Albert Museum, HMSO, London, 1990. p.xix.

'Chauncy Hare Townshend (1798-1868) was born into a wealthy family, only son of Henry Hare Townsend of Busbridge Hall, Godalming, Surrey. Educated at Eton and Trinity Hall, Cambridge (BA 1821). Succeeded to the family estates 1827, when he added 'h' to the Townsend name. He had taken holy orders, but while he always referred to himself as 'Rev.' on the title pages of his books, he never practised his vocation... . Very much a dilettante in the eighteenth-century sense, he moved in the highest social and literary circles; a great friend of Charles Dickens (he was the dedicatee of Great Expectations) with whom he shared a fascination of mesmerism... Bulwer Lytton described his life's 'Beau-deal of happiness' as 'elegant rest, travel, lots of money - and he is always ill and melancholy'. Of the many watercolours and British and continental oil paintings he bequeathed to the V&A, the majority are landscapes. He is the first identifiable British collector of early photographs apart from the Prince Consort, particularly landscape photography, and also collected gems and geological specimens.'

Historical significance: Adam Pynacker (1620-1673) was a Dutch painter and merchant who belonged to the group of Netherlandish artists known as the Dutch italianates. The works of these artists reveal first-hand knowledge of the Italian terrain and from the 1650s onwards. Pynacker appears to have had a particular interest in depicting waterfalls visible for example in Mountainous landscape with a waterfall ca. 1665-70, Mauritshuis, The Hague. Nevertheless, 1343-1869 lacks Pynacker’s attention to light effects and his use of compositional elements such as trees and figures to create a sense of depth. It appears rather to be a later work by an artist looking at Pynacker's work or the lithograph after the Mauritshuis painting made by the Dutch printmaker Wijnand Nuyen (1813-1839). If this work is indeed a cropped composition based on Nuyen's lithograph, this would account for the more summary treatment of the falling water and the less atmospheric qualities of Pynacker's luminous skies.

Dutch Italianate landscapes such as this were particularly popular in the 17th through to the early 19th centuries. The term conventionally refers to the school of Dutch painters and draughtsmen who were active in Rome for more than a hundred years. These artists produced mainly pastoral subjects bathed in warm southern light, set in an Italian, or specifically Roman, landscape. The term is also often applied, to artists who never left the northern Netherlands but who worked primarily in an Italianate style. Eighteenth-century collectors, especially French ones, preferred a view by Nicolaes Berchem or Jan Both to a scene of the Dutch country side by Jacob van Ruisdael for instance. The taste for the Italianates continued undiminished into the 19th century. An early voice denouncing these artists was that of John Constable in 1836 and at the end of the century Italianates had lost favour partly because of the rise of Impressionism and the appreciation of the Dutch national school of landscape expounded by such eminent critics as Wilhem von Bode, E.W. Moes and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot.

This work was attributed to Pynacker in the 1893 catalogue but was described as 'manner of Pynacker' by Kauffmann in the 1973 catalogue. Based on photographs only, Marijke de Kinkelder suggested in February 2010 (oral communication) an attribution to a German or Scandinavian artist at the begining of the 19th century. A comparison of 1343-1869 with the works of Scandinavian artist Johan Christian Dahl (1788-1857), who painted landscapes in the style of 17th century Dutch artists, also reveals a similarity in the treatment of light and an analagous dry, somewhat flat, painting style.

A rocky wooded landscape with distant hills and a figure in the foreground at the foot of the waterfall. Adam Pynacker belonged to the group of Netherlandish artists known as the Dutch Italianates. The works of these artists show first-hand knowledge of the Italian terrain and from the 1650s onwards. Pynacker appears to have had a particular interest in depicting waterfalls visible for example in Mountainous landscape with a waterfall ca. 1665-70, Mauritshuis, The Hague. Nevertheless, 1343-1869 lacks Pynacker’s attention to light effects and his use of compositional elements such as trees and figures to create a sense of depth. It appears rather to be a later work by an artist looking at Pynacker's work or the lithograph after the Mauritshuis painting made by the Dutch printmaker Wijnand Nuyen (1813-1839). This would account for the more summary treatment of the falling water and the less atmospheric qualities of Pynacker's luminous skies.

1343-1869