Oil Painting, 'Landscape with Cattle', Balthazar Paul Ommeganck, 1808

A verdant landscape with a peasant woman with a herd of grazing cattle, goats and sheep outside ruined fortification walls overgrown with greenery

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.

Historical significance: Balthasar-Paul Ommeganck (1755-1826) was a Flemish painter and apprentice of the landscape painter Henri-Joseph Antonissen (1737–94), who gave him a taste for sketching from nature. He was a talented and successful artist who gave a new breadth and vigour to landscape painting in the Low Countries, developing a new expressive manner combining the light employed by the Dutch Italianate painters of the 17th century with detailed observation of the hills and valleys of the Ardennes. His output was prodigious and always showed a painstaking attention to detail, a sure line and subtle use of colour. By 1799 Ommeganck had an international reputation, winning a first prize in Paris where he exhibited at the Salons of 1808 and 1809. The V&A work demonstrates Ommeganck's favoured pictorial effects such as the play of warm light, aerial perspective and undergrowth in shadow, and dates to the precise year in which Ommeganck mounted his first Salon exhibition.

The artistic relationships between the Northern and the Southern Netherlands, that is modern-day Holland and Belgium, were very strong during the 19th century especially after the proclamation of the Kingdom of Netherlands in 1815. The Prix de Rome was awarded equally to Antwerp and Amsterdam artists, even after the independence of Belgium in 1830. The majority of Belgian art of the first half of the 19th century, including history painting, genre scenes, landscape and portrait paintings, articulated a new national pride which nevertheless drew upon French academic taste. In their Landscape paintings at the end of the 18th and first half of the 19th centuries, Netherlandish artists returned to 17th century traditions and looked to the great painters of the Golden Age. This trend flourished in The Hague School (1870-90) in particular before coming to an end with the beginning of Impressionism.

A verdant landscape with a peasant woman with a herd of grazing cattle, goats and sheep outside ruined fortification walls overgrown with greenery. This signed and dated work is by Balthasar-Paul Ommeganck (1755-1826), a Flemish painter and apprentice of the landscape painter Henri-Joseph Antonissen (1737–94), who gave him a taste for sketching from nature. He was a talented and successful artist who gave a new breadth and vigour to landscape painting in the Low Countries, developing a new expressive manner combining the light employed by the Dutch Italianate painters of the 17th century with detailed observation of the hills and valleys of the Ardennes. His works show a painstaking attention to detail, a sure line and subtle use of colour. By 1799 Ommeganck had an international reputation, winning a first prize in Paris where he exhibited at the Salons of 1808 and 1809. The V&A work demonstrates Ommeganck's favoured pictorial effects such as the play of warm light, aerial perspective and undergrowth in shadow, and dates to the precise year in which Ommeganck mounted his first Salon exhibition.

570-1870