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Lot Essay
The present work is a characteristic example of Van Zwieten's art, for which see the works by the artist in H.-U. Beck, Künstler um Jan van Goyen, Doornspijk, 1991, nos. 1255-1274.
This picture is recorded as having been in the collection of the writer, connoisseur and collector, Richard Payne Knight. An antiquarian and among the leaders of the Picturesque movement in country house architecture, Knight oversaw the construction in 1773-4 of a castle at Downton, the estate that he inherited from an uncle. Inspired by the drawings of Claude Lorraine, of which Knight himself had formed a collection of over 250 examples, Downton was exceptional as a deliberately planned assymmetrical house. The interiors at Downton were classical and their quality has led Alastair Rowan to suggest the involvement of John Nash (quoted in M. Mansbridge, John Nash, London, 1991, p. 36, no. 4). Knight travelled extensively in Italy - first in 1767-8; again in 1777 in the company of Jakob Philipp Hackert, when he visited Sicily; and in 1785 when he stayed with in Naples with Sir William Hamilton, a fellow member of the Society of Dilettanti.
Knight set down his artistic theories and preferences in his highly influential Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London, 1805), which confirmed his position as the leading arbiter in England on matters of taste. Unsympathetic to neo-classicism, which he believed to reject the 'detailed adherence to the peculiarities of common individual nature', he generally preferred painterly to linear artists, regarding Rembrandt as superior to Michelangelo. His collection of 1,144 drawings, including albums by Gainsborough, Claude and Hamilton Mortimer, and numbering works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Michelangelo and Van Dyck, he left to the British Museum, although not his painting collection which included major works by Elsheimer, Rembrandt, Dou and Claude. Lawrence's portrait of Knight is in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
This picture is recorded as having been in the collection of the writer, connoisseur and collector, Richard Payne Knight. An antiquarian and among the leaders of the Picturesque movement in country house architecture, Knight oversaw the construction in 1773-4 of a castle at Downton, the estate that he inherited from an uncle. Inspired by the drawings of Claude Lorraine, of which Knight himself had formed a collection of over 250 examples, Downton was exceptional as a deliberately planned assymmetrical house. The interiors at Downton were classical and their quality has led Alastair Rowan to suggest the involvement of John Nash (quoted in M. Mansbridge, John Nash, London, 1991, p. 36, no. 4). Knight travelled extensively in Italy - first in 1767-8; again in 1777 in the company of Jakob Philipp Hackert, when he visited Sicily; and in 1785 when he stayed with in Naples with Sir William Hamilton, a fellow member of the Society of Dilettanti.
Knight set down his artistic theories and preferences in his highly influential Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste (London, 1805), which confirmed his position as the leading arbiter in England on matters of taste. Unsympathetic to neo-classicism, which he believed to reject the 'detailed adherence to the peculiarities of common individual nature', he generally preferred painterly to linear artists, regarding Rembrandt as superior to Michelangelo. His collection of 1,144 drawings, including albums by Gainsborough, Claude and Hamilton Mortimer, and numbering works by Rembrandt, Rubens, Michelangelo and Van Dyck, he left to the British Museum, although not his painting collection which included major works by Elsheimer, Rembrandt, Dou and Claude. Lawrence's portrait of Knight is in the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.