Oil Painting, 'Landscape with Fisherman and Boat', Jean Pierre François Lamorinière, 1872

A verdant landscape with a man in a boat fishing on the pond in the foreground, a woman carrying baskets in the field beyond and a village illuminated by a sunbeam breaking through the clouds in the distance

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon, 1886
Joshua Dixon (1811-1885), was the son of Abraham Dixon of Whitehaven and brother of George Dixon (who was head of the foreign merchants firm of Rabone Brothers in Birmingham 1883-98). Educated at Leeds Grammar School, and was deputy chairman of the London, Chatham and Dover Railway Company 1869-70. Died Winslade, near Exeter, 7 December 1885. Bequeathed all his collection of drawings, watercolours and oil paintings to the Bethnal Green Museum; they have since been transferred to the V&A. He also collected engravings, Japanese vases and panels, and bronze and marble sculpture.

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

Historical significance: François Lamorinière, (1828-1911) was a Belgian painter and engraver. He studied with the Romantic landscape painter Jacob Jacobs (1812–79). His preference for a detailed perception of nature rather than a synthetic evocation went against the tide of landscape painting in Belgium. In June 1853 Lamorinière stayed in Barbizon, in the company of the artists Alfred de Knyff and brothers Xavier and César De Cock. He was one of the first Belgian painters to work outdoors there, following the example of French artists. On his return to Antwerp, Lamorinière joined the Cercle Artistique, where he exhibited regularly. In 1862 Lamorinière met the London dealer Ernest Gambart, and visits to him in England inspired several versions of View of Burnham Wood (e.g. Liège, Mus. Ansembourg). 1084-1886 was probably painted in Antwerp in the period after Lamorinière's time in Barbizon and demonstrates how, despite his exposure to that school, he continued to depict nature by means of meticulous observation and minutely detailed technique, rather than evoking atmospheric nuances. In 1880 Lamorinière became a member of the Vereniging voor Antwerpse Etsers (Association of Antwerp Engravers) and between 1880 and 1886 he was involved in illustrating albums published by them. Although he enjoyed a considerable reputation, he was attacked by younger artists for his ‘photographic realism’.

Landscape paintings became extremely popular during the 17th century and increasingly encompassed a variety of forms and genres. Dutch painters had a new attention for nature and their familiar surroundings and progressively did experiments with innovative techniques concentrating on the atmospheric effects and the sense of depth. The end of the 17th century is remarkable for a shift in taste that came to favour more academic and classical landscapes under the influence of Italianate landscape paintings. However during the end of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th, Dutch artists returned to favour the 17th century imagery and largely imitated the landscape and genre paintings of the great painters of the Golden Age. 19th century landscape painters began incorporating ideas from the Romantic movement which started first in Western Europe as a literary and philosophical movement and only gradually involved the other arts, explicitly around 1800. Romantic artists were fascinated by nature they interpreted as a mirror of the mind. They investigated human nature and personality, the folk culture, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the remote, the mysterious and the occult. The interest in the exotic and the non-Western, illustrated in France by such a painter as Eugène Delacroix (1798-1863), as well as the medieval revival, witnessed in England by Horace Walpole (1717-1797), are perhaps the most identifiable parts of Romanticism. It is really in the Post-Napoleonic period that this movement gained ascendancy. In the visual arts, it was largely played out by 1850, but it persisted in musical circles for another generation.

A verdant landscape with a man in a boat fishing on the pond in the foreground, a woman carrying baskets in the field beyond and a village illuminated by a sunbeam breaking through the clouds in the distance. François Lamorinière, (1828-1911) was a Belgian painter and engraver. He studied with the Romantic landscape painter Jacob Jacobs (1812–79). His preference for a detailed perception of nature rather than a synthetic evocation went against the tide of landscape painting in Belgium. In June 1853 Lamorinière stayed in Barbizon where he was one of the first Belgian painters to work outdoors there, following the example of French artists. 1084-1886 was probably painted in Antwerp in the period after Lamorinière's time in Barbizon and demonstrates how, despite his exposure to that school, he continued to depict nature by means of meticulous observation and minutely detailed technique, rather than evoking atmospheric nuances.

1084-1886