Italian Landscape with Travellers - Dutch Golden Age 17thC art oil painting

Circa 1670

This superb British 18th century Old Master oil painting is attributed to circle of noted landscape artist Richard Wilson. Painted circa 1750 it is a stunning light, bright and airy expansive panoramic landscape. There is a river in the foreground and mountains in the background. On the left of the river stands some ruins and on the right, figures are resting under the trees. The palette of blues, greens and very varied and rich with some lovely pinky brown tones for the land on the right. The brushwork is also delicate but confidently executed. A superb example of a British Old Master landscape oil painting, finished off in a carved and gilt wood English Rococo frame with name plate. Provenance. The Asbjorn Lunde Foundation, Inc. Throughout his long life, Mr. Lunde supported more than forty museums in his native New York, across the United States, and in Europe with loans, gifts, and funding. Mr. Lunde was a proud New Yorker with roots in Norway. He was keenly interested in nineteenth-century Scandinavian and Swiss landscape painting, Old Master painting, and Asian decorative arts. According to an old label to the reverse, the present painting was once owned by James Northcote (1746-1831) who gave it to William Hillman on 25th May 183(0?) Property of the Bacot family. Christies stamps verso. Watson Gallery London. Remains of label verso. Condition. Oil on canvas, 26 inches by 18 inches and in good condition. Frame. Housed In a carved and gilt wood English Rococo frame bearing Richard Wilson name plate, 33 inches by 25 inches and in good condition. Richard Wilson RA...

This lovely painting is a British Old Master late 18th century or early 19th-century oil painting by Thomas Barker of Bath. It is stylistically very similar to his other works of the...

Pair of Italian 18' century paintings , oil on canvas with Venetian Palace gardens , antiques sculptures and various figures . Measurements with f...

The Great Fire of London in September 1666 was one of the greatest disasters in the city’s history. The City, with its wooden houses crowded together in narrow streets, was a natural fire risk, and predictions that London would burn down became a shocking reality. The fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane, an area near the Thames teeming with warehouses and shops full of flammable materials, such as timber, oil, coal, pitch and turpentine. Inevitably the fire spread rapidly from this area into the City. Our painting depicts the impact of the fire on those who were caught in it and creates a very dramatic impression of what the fire was like. Closer inspection reveals a scene of chaos and panic with people running out of the gates. It shows Cripplegate in the north of the City, with St Giles without Cripplegate to its left, in flames (on the site of the present day Barbican). The painting probably represents the fire on the night of Tuesday 4 September, when four-fifths of the City was burning at once, including St Paul's Cathedral. Old St Paul’s can be seen to the right of the canvas, the medieval church with its thick stone walls, was considered a place of safety, but the building was covered in wooden scaffolding as it was in the midst of being restored by the then little known architect, Christopher Wren and caught fire. Our painting seems to depict a specific moment on the Tuesday night when the lead on St Paul’s caught fire and, as the diarist John Evelyn described: ‘the stones of Paul’s flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream and the very pavements glowing with the firey redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’ Although the loss of life was minimal, some accounts record only sixteen perished, the magnitude of the property loss was shocking – some four hundred and thirty acres, about eighty per cent of the City proper was destroyed, including over thirteen thousand houses, eighty-nine churches, and fifty-two Guild Halls. Thousands were homeless and financially ruined. The Great Fire, and the subsequent fire of 1676, which destroyed over six hundred houses south of the Thames, changed the appearance of London forever. The one constructive outcome of the Great Fire was that the plague, which had devastated the population of London since 1665, diminished greatly, due to the mass death of the plague-carrying rats in the blaze. The fire was widely reported in eyewitness accounts, newspapers, letters and diaries. Samuel Pepys recorded climbing the steeple of Barking Church from which he viewed the destroyed City: ‘the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw.’ There was an official enquiry into the causes of the fire, petitions to the King and Lord Mayor to rebuild, new legislation and building Acts. Naturally, the fire became a dramatic and extremely popular subject for painters and engravers. A group of works relatively closely related to the present picture have been traditionally ascribed to Jan Griffier...