Oil painting, 'Landscape with Ruins', style of Richard Wilson

Purchased, 1876
Lot 44 Christie's, 7 April 1876; bt. Whitehead (Sold by executors of William Rixon, Gordon Square). Cat. as 'Unknown'. Bt from Whitehead for £3, and received by the Museum on 10 April 1876, for the Circulation Dept.

Historical significance: This painting was bought in 1876 for the Museum's Circulation Dept. It was catalogued by Christie's as 'Unknown', but was described by the Museum as 'School of Wilson'. Its relationship to the work of Richard Wilson is tenuous and although Constable said that it was right to call it a "school piece", Brinsley Ford, Douglas Cooper and Graham Reynolds believed it to be early nineteenth century and to scarcely warrant the attribution of 'School of' Wilson.

Note on Departmental file for 229-1876: "Seen 3/6/48 with Mr Brinsley Ford [author of The Drawings of Richard Wilson, London, Faber and Faber, 1951] and Mr Douglas Cooper. Certainly not Wilson and scarcely even 'School of' Wilson. Probably early nineteenth century."

W.G. Constable, Richard Wilson, Routledge and Paul, 1953, p.105, "rightly catalogued as a school piece".

See Richard Wilson and his Circle, The Tate Gallery, 1949 [Organized by the City Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham]. Although this exhibition did not include examples from the V&A, it set Wilson's then recognised paintings alongside works by pupils of Wilson, as well as variants and copies of his work - thereby illuminating how influential and also how collectable Wilson's work was in the years after his death. In the 'Introduction' Mary Woodall (Keeper of the Department of Art, city Museum and Art Gallery, Birmingham] wrote, "... his pictures were.. much copied by his pupils and by others with less scrupulous motives...". Woodhall commented further, "Within a few years of his death Wilson's work was confused with that of his pupils, so that Farington, when he visited the Booth collection in 1807*, pointed out that one picture was by Hodges; [Farington] also remarked that some of the pictures attributed to Wilson in the exhibition at the British Institution in 1814 were not by the master." Woodhall also noted however that "... [Wilson] himself often made uninspired replicas of his original designs", highlighting the difficulty in attributing works by Wilson.

[*Benjamin Booth (1732-1807), was a great admirer of Wilson's work and bought many of his pictures. Joseph Farington, R.A. (1747-1821) was a pupil of Richard Wilson, whose studio he entered in 1763.]

229-1876