- Description
-
- Creator
- Francis Towne (1739 - 1816)
- Title(s)
-
- The Campagna near Rome looking towards the Sabine Mountains
- Date
- 1786
- Medium
- Pencil, watercolour
- Dimensions
-
- image width 232mm,
- image length 474mm
- Mount
- mounted by the artist
- Inscription
-
- artist's mount, verso
- “The Campagna near Rome looking towards the Sabine Mountains”
- Object Type
- Watercolour
-
- Collection
-
- (T08266)
- Catalogue Number
- FT419
- Description Sources
- Examination; 1997 Tate Oppé catalogue (image)
Provenance
Untraced until sold at Christie’s on 22 June 1925, lot 11, where it was bought by Agnew’s (no.10665) on behalf of Paul Oppé (1878–1957; no.1791), who bought it from them on 25 June 1925 for £1 1s. Oppé’s descendants sold it in 1996 with the rest of Oppé’s collection to the present owner, the Tate Gallery (T08266).
- Associated People & Organisations
- Tate, London, 1996, T08266
- Adolph Paul Oppé (1878 - 1957), London, 25 June 1925, GBP 1.1s, no.1791
- Thomas Agnew & Sons, London, 22 June 1925
no.10665 - Christie's, London, London, 22 June 1925
lot 11
- Exhibition History
- Catalogue of a collection of pictures, drawings, furniture and works of art of the Empire and Regency period : select examples of Romano-British art, Burlington Fine Arts Club, 1929, no. 26
- 76th Annual Exhibition of Water-Colour Drawings, Thomas Agnew & Sons, 1949, no. 24
- Early English Drawings and Watercolours from the Collection of Paul Oppe Esq., Graves Art Gallery, 1952, no. 73
- Exhibition of Works from The Paul Oppe Collection, Royal Academy, 1958, no. 84
- Il Settecento a Roma, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1959
- Exhibition of Works from The Paul Oppe Collection, National Gallery of Canada, 1961, no. 92
- British Watercolours from the Oppé Collection, Tate Gallery, 1997, no. 37
- Bibliography
- Adrian Bury, Francis Towne - Lone Star of Water-Colour Painting, Charles Skilton: London, 1962, p. 145
Revisions & Feedback
The website will be updated from time to time and, when changes are made, a PDF of the previous version of each page will be archived here for consultation and citation.
Please help us to improve this catalogue
If you have information, a correction or any other suggestions to improve this catalogue, please contact us.
Comment
This is a version of FT175, undated, although on stylistic grounds probably dating from the mid-to late 1780s. At auction in 1925 the drawing was called “On the Porta Pia, Rome, 1780”, and on receipt of the drawing Oppé made the following description of the work’s mount and frame:
This description is not wholly clear but it may be that the back of the drawing originally bore Towne’s signature, which was erased and replaced with Cozens’s. Possibly also the date, which evidently Oppé could not read clearly, had been erased, as by 1795 Cozens was by then too ill to work and the reattribution to Cozens would not have been credible. Nevertheless, Oppé’s note provides a valuable glimpse into the ways in which the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art trade attempted to reconcile Towne’s work with their limited knowledge of late eighteenth-century watercolour artists.