Oil painting, 'Landscape with Cottage and Brook', Patrick Nasmyth, 1819

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon

Bequeathed by Joshua Dixon, 1886

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

This painting is signed and dated 1819, and in its choice of subject matter and spatial organisation, could well be an early response to Constable’s highly successful The White Horse, now in The Frick Collection (1943.1.147), which was exhibited at the Royal Academy in April 1819. For example, as in Constable’s work, Nasmyth employs the large motif of a gabled farmhouse and an oak to push back the middle-ground and create the vast expanse of space in the foreground. The motif of large- gabled house and watery expanse, is also reminiscent of that in Constable’s Dedham Mill, a version of which was exhibited at the British Institution in 1819 and possibly earlier at the Royal Academy in 1818 (see Graham Reynolds, The Later Paintings and Drawings of John Constable, Text, Yale, 1984, p.47). Nasmyth was a frequent exhibitor at both institutions from 1811 and would no doubt have seen Constable’s works.

The use of such techniques in landscape painting also recalls Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/9-82), particularly his later works, and may point to the common heritage of both Nasmyth and Constable in the work of this renowned 17th-century Dutch landscape artist; for a discussion of Constable’s admiration of Ruisdael, see Leslie Parris and Ian Fleming-Williams (eds.), Constable, London, 1991, p.493, and Seymour Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, Yale, 2005, p.29).

Patrick Nasmyth made studies from nature of trees, plants, hedgerow subjects and details of foliage and trees. James Nasmyth wrote of his brother’s trouble in recording cloud formations, and Patrick’s truthful approach is visible in 1033-1886 with its painting of stratocumulous cloud (see Peter Johnson and Ernle Money (eds.), The Nasmyth Family of Painters, 1977, p.30).

In its choice of subject matter and spatial organisation, this unidentified view, dated 1819, is possibly an early response to Constable’s The White Horse, exhibited in 1819. As well as being influenced by his more successful contemporary, Nasmyth also owed a heavy debt to Dutch, 17th-century landscape painting, particularly Ruisdael and Hobbema.

1033-1886