Catalogue entry
Richard Wilson RA ?1713–1782
NG 6197
The Valley of the Dee, with Chester in the Distance
NG 6196
Holt Bridge on the River Dee
, 2000
Extracted from:
Judy Egerton, The British Paintings (London: National Gallery Company and Yale University Press, 2000).
© The National Gallery, London
© The National Gallery, London
NG 6196
Holt Bridge on the River Dee
exhibited 1762
Oil on canvas, 148.5 × 193 cm (58½ × 76 in.)
and (see pp. 330–1)
NG 6197
The Valley of the Dee, with Chester in the Distance
? exhibited 1761
Oil on canvas, 148 × 193.5 cm (58¼ × 76¼ in.)
Provenance (for both NG 6196 and NG 6197)
Probably purchased from the artist by Lyonel Tollemache (1708–70), 4th Earl of Dysart.1 and by family descent to Bentley Lyonel John Tollemache, 3rd Baron Tollemache, until sold (two years before his death in 1953) by the Trustees of the Tollemache Estates, Christie’s 15 May 1953 (158, 159), bt Agnew’s, from whom purchased by the National Gallery (Colnaghi Fund) 1953.
Exhibited (NG 6196)
SA 1762 (135); BI Winter 1841 (119 or 123, as ‘Landscape’, lent by J. Tollemache); London, Agnew’s, English Landscapes, 1926 (18); RA 1951–2 (21); Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, English Landscape from Gainsborough to Turner, 1955 (65); Tate Gallery, Landscape in Britain, 1973 (37); Tate Gallery and Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, Richard Wilson, 1982–3 (95).
Exhibited
Both at the Tate Gallery 1960 ; 1963 ; 1968 ; 1974–5 .
Literature (for both NG 6196 and NG 6197)
J.P. Neale, Views of the Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland, IV, 1821, n.p. (under ‘Helmingham Hall’); Brinsley Ford, The Drawings of Richard Wilson, London 1951, pp. 36 and 62, plate 70; W.G. Constable, Richard Wilson, London 1953, p. 175, plates 35 a and b; Davies 1959, pp. 108–9; Leslie Parris, Landscape in Britain, exh. cat., Tate Gallery 1973, p. 31; David Solkin, Richard Wilson, exh. cat., London 1982, pp. 207–9.
[page 327][page 328]
Finished drawing for Holt Bridge on the River Dee, c. 1760. Black chalk heightened with white on buff‐coloured prepared paper, 33.7 × 52.8 cm. Birmingham City Art Gallery , inv. 1948P46 . © Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery.
Technical Notes (for both NG 6916 and NG 6197)
The paintings have not been cleaned since their acquisition in 1953. Although the varnish is yellow, it has been thought that the distracting effect of the very severe drying cracks (see below) would be worsened by cleaning.
Both canvases have pale biscuit‐coloured grounds comprising lead white, calcium carbonate (chalk) and a little transparent golden ochre. Analysis of pigment samples shows, in NG 6196 (i) Prussian blue with yellow ochre, lead white and a little black in foliage of large tree at right: some Naples yellow added in foliage, right; (ii) white, Prussian blue, bone black, red ochre and a trace of vermilion in cliff‐face, right; (iii) Naples yellow and red ochre mixture in opaque orange‐yellow foliage, foreground. Similar pigments were also used in NG 6197. In both pictures, skies are pale tints of Prussian blue; some fading has occurred. Mid‐mustard‐yellow pigment in sky of NG 6197 is pure Naples yellow (lead antimonate). Examination of an island of wrinkled brown paint from the forest at the horizon of NG 6197 shows highly heterogeneous pigment mixture – orange‐red ochre (crystalline), yellow ochre, Prussian blue, white, yellow lake (probably), red lake, traces of black – used in a single layer over the ground.
These pigment mixtures for the greens and browns of foliage bear comparison with other eighteenth‐century pictures, for example Gainsborough’s landscape backgrounds, and may be taken to represent standard practice. The complexity of the mixed greens indicates the lack of any single stable green pigment of reasonable colour intensity on the eighteenth‐century palette for oil painting. The rather intensely coloured green earth found in some eighteenth‐century Italian pictures seems not to have reached England.
A conspicuous feature of both NG 6196 and NG 6197 is the presence of pronounced drying cracks: in both landscape and foliage, the paint appears to have shrunk to form soft‐edged islands of the order of 5 mm across. This kind of fault is generally associated either with non‐drying pigments such as bitumen or with poorly drying media. There is no evidence from cross‐sections for the use of bitumen; the paint layers however have a vaguely gelatinous look under the microscope, for example in the duller greens of foliage paint, suggesting an unusual medium or combination of media. Cross‐sections do not show particularly complex layer structures, which is one possible cause of drying faults.
Both walnut and linseed oil were found to have been used as binders, mixed with a significant amount of larch resin (Venice Turpentine) in one sample and with pine resin in another. The presence of resin in the most ‘crocodiled’ areas may well be a contributing factor, as may the thick medium‐rich paint and the use of large amounts of diluent.
[page 329]Discussion
Both NG 6196 and NG 6197 depict views of the valley of the River Dee, from opposite viewpoints near the village of Holt in Cheshire. Both are designed with some artistic licence: these are landscapes painted in the spirit of Claude rather than precise topography. Leslie Parris observed in 1973 that Wilson’s departure from strict topography in NG 6196 is ‘solemnly vouched for by Martin Davies, who “could not get to the right spot”’ from which the view might have been seen; Davies noted that ‘the foreground seems clearly to have been invented; and the general character of the scene has been somewhat changed by Wilson, the hills in particular being made to look higher than they do’.2
In NG 6196, as Wilson specified in its exhibited title, the view includes Holt Bridge, spanning the Dee (in Welsh, Afon Dyfrdwy) at a point where that river serves as a border between Wales and England. The fourteenth‐century Holt Bridge appears to be accurately represented; it survives, though its gatehouse, already decayed in Wilson’s day, disintegrated soon afterwards.3 The small village of Holt, in the Welsh county of Denbighshire,4 is on the spectator’s left; the larger village of Farndon, in the English county of Cheshire, is on the right. Farndon, with the square tower of its church of St Chad prominent,5 seems in Wilson’s picture to surmount high striated cliffs; these are in fact red sandstone rocks, quarried for centuries, which lie largely outside Farndon. By exaggerating their height, Wilson contrives to give the village church a dramatic position akin to that of the ruined tower on a beetling cliff in his The Destruction of the Children of Niobe (fig. 2), which he had exhibited two years earlier in 1760, and which David Solkin justly calls the key picture of Wilson’s career.6
The high central stage in the foreground (evidently created from a steep but non‐existent hill) is the product of artistic licence rather than nature. On this stage a trio of arcadian (or Claudian) figures is grouped, in the shade of a graceful tree which itself plays an important part in the composition; but the high stage is primarily designed to elevate the spectator, providing a lofty viewpoint above the Dee, looking far along the river to the distant Clwydian hills.
A preliminary chalk study of the scene (fig. 1)7 is closely followed in the painting, but the figures of the woman and child in the drawing are replaced in the oil by a larger and more poetic group. The drawing was later owned by Wilson’s pupil Paul Sandby.
The Destruction of the Children of Niobe, exhibited 1760. Oil on canvas, 58 × 74 cm. New Haven, Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection , inv. B1977.14.81 . © Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection & Fund.
NG 6197
The Valley of the Dee,
with Chester in the Distance
? exhibited 1761
Oil on canvas, 148 × 193.5 cm (58¼ × 76¼ in.)
Note: Details of Provenance and Literature and the Technical Notes given under NG 6196 also relate to NG 6197; its exhibition history slightly differs.
Exhibited
? SA , London 1761 (140, as ‘View near Chester’); BI Winter 1841 (119 or 123, as ‘Landscape’, lent by J. Tollemache); London, Agnew’s, English Landscapes, 1926 (18); RA 1951–2 (23); Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, English Landscape from Gainsborough to Turner, 1955 (66); London, Tate Gallery, and Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, Richard Wilson, 1982–3 (96).
Copy
A full‐size, faithful copy of NG 6197 (but with a pinker sky), by an unknown near‐contemporary artist, was sold at Phillips 28 June 1976 (140, as by Wilson, repr.) and is now in a private English collection.
Discussion
Like NG 6196, this is also a view of the valley of the Dee; but the viewpoint was for long elusive. Davies 1959 proposed (though ‘doubtfully’) that this might be a view looking in the opposite direction from NG 6196, and he suggested that the artist here looks south in the direction of Wrexham. A new identification as The Valley of the Dee, with Chester in the Distance was proposed by David Solkin in his Wilson exhibition catalogue of 1982, as a ‘hypothesis’ made on the basis of a watercolour by John ‘Warwick’ Smith (1749–1831) which is inscribed on the verso View before Gresford Church Yard, looking to its pleasing valley, watered by the River Alun, looking beyond it to Chester in the Distance. Denbighshire.8 Solkin added that if his hypothesis was correct, then NG 6197 might be identifiable with the ‘View near Chester' that Wilson exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1761.
The compiler is most grateful to Peter Boughton, Keeper of Art, Grosvenor Museum, Chester, who confirms Solkin’s hypothesis that the view can be identified as The Valley of the Dee, with Chester in the Distance; but as Boughton points out,9 Wilson’s viewpoint is not the same as ‘Warwick’ Smith’s. While both artists depict a meandering river, Wilson’s river is undoubtedly the Dee; the considerably narrower river in Smith’s watercolour is (as the artist himself noted in his inscription on the verso) the River Alun, a tributary of the Dee. While Smith’s view is taken from near the village of Gresford, looking north‐north‐east to Chester, Wilson’s view is most likely to have been taken downstream from Holt, the village seen in NG 6196, from a viewpoint some five miles to the east of Gresford. The River Dee runs, with many curves, generally northwards. As Boughton points out, Wilson looks downstream in both these paintings, his viewpoint for NG 6197 being further downstream (that is, further north) by one and a half or two miles from that for NG 6196.
Though there is little definition in Wilson’s depiction of the distant town, it is possible to distinguish two towers. Boughton notes that Chester in about 1760 was still a small city, whose skyline was dominated by the towers of Chester Cathedral and St John’s Church. Given the difference in viewpoint, the contours of Wilson’s distant hills understandably differ from Smith’s. Boughton has identified the dark hill to the right of Chester in Wilson’s view as Helsby Hill; the pale hills in the distance behind the city may be in Lancashire, beyond the River Mersey.
As Solkin proposed, NG 6197 can now positively be identified as a ‘View near Chester’, and may well be the picture of that title which Wilson exhibited at the Society of Artists in 1761 (140).
Notes
1. The compiler is most grateful to the Hon. Michael Tollemache for bringing his knowledge of his ancestors to bear on the question of which Dysart is most likely to have purchased the Wilsons. He believes that they were almost certainly purchased by the 4th Earl of Dysart, the first Tollemache to inherit (in 1740, from his Wilbraham grandmother) estates in Cheshire centering on Woodhey Hall, near Ridley. The 4th Earl may have purchased the paintings from the artist at or soon after the SA exhibitions of 1761 and 1762; since these views do not include the Earl’s Cheshire estates, it is unlikely (or contrary to most eighteenth‐century noblemen’s sense of property) that he would have commissioned them.
NG 6196 and 6197 appear first to have been recorded in the Dysart family's collection in 1821 (as Solkin notes), when J.P. Neale noted ‘two views in Cheshire, by Wilson’ at Helmingham Hall, to whose tenancy the 76‐year‐old Louisa, Countess of Dysart had earlier that year succeeded; but she is not known to have collected pictures. If not purchased by her father the 4th Earl, the Wilsons were presumably purchased by his younger son the 6th Earl (d.1821), as assumed (i) by E.K. Waterhouse, The Collection of Pictures in Helmingham Hall, Helmingham Hall 1958, p. 9 (Waterhouse, writing in 1958, mentions the two Wilsons, sold in 1953, only in passing, but describes the 6th Earl as the only one who ‘seems genuinely to have loved pictures for their own sakes’, and as ‘an enlightened patron of British contemporary artists’); and (ii) by R.B. Beckett, John Constable’s Correspondence, IV, Suffolk Records Society, 1966, p. 48. But while the 6th Earl’s purchases of works by Reynolds and Gainsborough are documented, as is his patronage of Constable, there is no evidence (and no family tradition) that he purchased the Wilsons. (Back to text.)
2. Parris 1973, p. 31, quoting from Davies 1959. pp. 108–9. (Back to text.)
3. Holt Bridge was built 1338–9. Davies 1959, p. 109, notes that Thomas Pennant, A Tour in Wales, 1778, p. 204, describes the bridge and its ‘vestige of a guardhouse’. In the engraved view after G. Pickering, 1817 (repr. G. Ormerod, History of Cheshire, 1882, II, p. 742), the gatehouse has already gone. (Back to text.)
4. Part of the officially renamed county of Clwyd since 1974. (Back to text.)
5. For a modern view of the tower, see R. Richards, Old Cheshire Churches, 1947, fig. 144. (Back to text.)
6. Solkin 1982, p. 200. Solkin reproduces the Yale picture p. 201, and in colour plate V, p. 5 3, discussing it (and versions of it) pp. 59–66 and under cat. no. 87, pp. 200–2. (Back to text.)
7. See Ford 1951, pp. 36, 62 (no. 70), plate 70. In Paul Sandby’s sale, Christie’s, second day, 3 May 1811 (97, with a view ‘at Lericcie’), as ‘View on the banks of the Dee in Cheshire’: later in William Esdaile’s collection. (Back to text.)
8. Coll, the National library of Wales. Aberystwyth; the compiler is grateful to Paul Joyner of that Library for detailed information. (Back to text.)
9. In discussing the pictures in the National Gallery, and in much helpful subsequent correspondence. (Back to text.)
Abbreviations
- BI
- British Institution, London
- bt
- bought (usually in the saleroom)
- RA
- Royal Academy of Arts, London; Royal Academician
- SA
- Society of Artists, London
List of references cited
- Constable 1953
- Constable, W.G., Richard Wilson, London 1953
- Davies 1946
- Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The British School, London 1946 (revised edn, London 1959)
- Davies 1959
- Davies, Martin, National Gallery Catalogues: The British School, revised edn, London 1959
- Ford 1951
- Ford, Brinsley, The Drawings of Richard Wilson, London 1951
- JCC
- Beckett, R.B., ed., John Constable’s Correspondence, 6 vols, Ipswich, Suffolk Records Society, 1962–8
- Neale 1821
- Neale, John P., Views of the Seats of Noblemen and Gentlemen in England and Wales, Scotland and Ireland (n.p.), 1821, 1st series, IV
- Ormerod 1882
- Ormerod, G., History of Cheshire, 1882
- Parris 1973
- Parris, Leslie, Landscape in Britain (exh. cat. Tate Gallery), London 1973
- Pennant 1778
- Pennant, Thomas, A Tour in Wales, 1778
- Richards 1947
- Richards, R., Old Cheshire Churches, 1947
- Solkin 1982
- Solkin, David, Richard Wilson (exh. cat.), London 1982
- Waterhouse 1958a
- Waterhouse, E.K., The Collection of Pictures in Helmingham Hall, Helmingham Hall 1958
- Young Ottley 1832
- Young Ottley, W., Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, with Critical Remarks on their Merits, London 1832
List of exhibitions cited
- London 1761
- London, Society of Artists, 1761
- London 1762
- London, Society of Artists, 1762
- London 1841
- London, British Institution, Winter 1841
- London 1926
- London, Agnew’s, English Landscapes, 1926
- London 1951–2
- London, Royal Academy of Arts, The First Hundred Years of the Royal Academy, 1769–1868, 8 December 1951–9 March 1952
- London 1953-62
- London, National Gallery, National Gallery Acquisitions, 1953–62
- London 1960
- London, Tate Gallery, on loan, 1960
- London 1963
- London, Tate Gallery, on loan, 1963
- London 1968
- London, Tate Gallery, on loan, 1968
- London 1973–4
- London, Tate Gallery, Landscape in Britain circa 1750–1850, 20 November 1973–3 February 1974 (exh. cat.: Parris 1973)
- London 1974–5
- London, Tate Gallery, on loan, 1974–5
- London and Cardiff 1982–3
- London, Tate Gallery; Cardiff, National Museum of Wales, Richard Wilson, 1982–3
- Rotterdam 1955
- Rotterdam, Museum Boymans, English Landscape Painting from Gainsborough to Turner, 5 March–28 April 1955; British Council
Arrangement of the Catalogue
This is a catalogue of the 61 works which represent the British School in the National
Gallery now, at the beginning of 1998. The first Descriptive Catalogue of the Pictures in the National Gallery, with Critical Remarks
on their Merits, by W. Young Ottley, was published in 1832 (earlier catalogues were hardly more than hand‐lists). The first scholarly catalogue
devoted to the Gallery’s British pictures – National Gallery Catalogues: The British School – was compiled by Martin Davies (Director 1968–73). Its first edition in 1946 included 333 pictures. By 1959, when Davies published a revised edition (following large transfers of pictures upon
the Tate’s separation
in 1954
from the National Gallery in 1954), the number of British pictures in the National
Gallery had been reduced to 99.
Martin Davies’s British School catalogue still stands as a model of concise record and meticulous (sometimes astringent) footnotes. This catalogue is chattier. I have tried to combine accurate information about the making and subsequent history of the pictures with more concern for their subject matter than Martin Davies allowed himself. Here I share to the full Neil MacGregor’s conviction that the public should have as much information as possible about their pictures. In a collection still dominated by portraits, much information about sitters (men, women and, in the largest portrait of all, a horse) is available; some of it may help to assess how far a portraitist has succeeded in reflecting [page 17]individual character. The background information offered here can, of course, be skipped, leaving the illustrations – or better still, the actual works – to speak for themselves.
All the works have been examined in the company of Martin Wyld, the Gallery’s Chief Restorer. He has compiled all the Technical Notes except for those on Hogarth’s Marriage A‐la‐Mode, which have been contributed by David Bomford. Many of these Technical Notes incorporate the results of detailed examination by Ashok Roy, Head of the Scientific Department, and by his colleagues Raymond White and Jennie Pilc. The bibliography of published work on the techniques and pigments used by artists during the period covered by this catalogue (pp. 432–5) has been compiled by Jo Kirby of the Gallery’s Scientific Department.
The catalogue is arranged in the two parts into which it fairly naturally falls. Part I catalogues the well‐known and deservedly popular works which are nearly always on view (except when lent to outside exhibitions). The artists represented in it are Constable, Gainsborough, Hogarth, Thomas Jones, Lawrence, Reynolds, Sargent, Stubbs, Turner, Wilson, Wright of Derby and Zoffany, arranged in alphabetical order, with their works (when more than one) in their known (or likely) chronological sequence. The time‐span of works by this small group of twelve artists is hardly more than 150 years, from Hogarth’s six paintings of Marriage A‐la‐Mode, of about 1742, to Sargent’s Lord Ribblesdale, dated 1902. In this part of the catalogue, movements of pictures to and from the Tate are briefly noted (below the heading Exhibited), such information being offered to reassure those who remember seeing, say, Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump in the Tate rather than in the National Gallery (or recalling locations given in past literature) that their recollection was not at fault. Under this heading, movements for short periods usually indicate loans supplied by the Tate to fill gaps on the National Gallery walls when it lent pictures for exhibition elsewhere. ‘Tate 1960–1’, frequently noted, indicates the period of the Gallery’s winter exhibition National Gallery Acquisitions 1953–62 ; to make room for this exhibition, most of its British School pictures were accommodated and displayed in the Tate Gallery.
Part II catalogues the Gallery’s collection of portraits (including four marble busts) of those who played significant parts in the history of the National Gallery itself. Since it is in a sense a narrative (though an incomplete one) of the Gallery’s history, Part II is presented chronologically, according to the various sitters’ relationships to the National Gallery. Lawrence is the only artist to appear in both parts of this catalogue (his portrait of *Queen Charlotte appears in Part I, his two portraits of *John Julius Angerstein in Part II). In this group, Sir George Beaumont (grudgingly sitting to Hoppner, an artist he habitually denigrated) will be a familiar figure in the history of British art. Other Trustees and benefactors – preeminently, perhaps, Layard of Nineveh – will be better known outside the perspectives of the National Gallery, while two of its minor heroes – William Seguier, the Gallery’s first Keeper, and William Boxall RA , its second Director – may hardly be known at all.
Few portraits of National Gallery benefactors were ever transferred to the Tate; the only exceptions appear to be the transfer of the first version of Linnell’s portrait of Samuel Rogers (the National Gallery retaining a second version) and the transfer in 1949 of Hoppner’s portrait of Charles Long, Lord Farnborough, accepted by the National Gallery as a gift in 1934, but hung for a few months only, before being pronounced by Sir Kenneth Clark (Director, 1933–45) ‘not worth a place’. The National Gallery retains a finer image of Long in the form of Chantrey’s marble bust. Most of the works in Part II are hung in the Reception Area or the Reserve Collection.
All but one of the benefactors who figure in Part II have one thing in common: they bought pictures, but begat no heirs, and therefore chose to give or bequeath paintings to the National Gallery. The exception is the actor‐manager Thomas Denison Lewis, who in 1849 bequeathed not only *Mr Lewis as The Marquis in the Midnight Hour (Shee’s portrait of his famous actor‐father), but also £10,000 for future Gallery purchases. Prudently invested, the Lewis Fund enabled the purchase of many National Gallery pictures of all schools, including two much‐loved British pictures: the Heads of Six of Hogarth’s Servants and Gainsborough’s *Cornard Wood. The Hogarth was transferred to the Tate in 1960: thus, unknowingly, Lewis became a benefactor to both institutions.
Ann
An
Appendix includes provisional catalogue entries for *Portrait of a Lady, painted by Cornelius Johnson (or Jonson van Ceulen) after his return to Holland,
and *On the Delaware, by the wholly American painter George Inness. Both were included in Martin Davies’s
British School catalogue, but since they do not properly belong to the British School, they will
eventually be included in more appropriate Schools catalogues.
About this version
Version 3, generated from files JE_2000__16.xml dated 20/02/2025 and database__16.xml dated 28/02/2025 using stylesheet 16_teiToHtml_externalDb.xsl dated 03/01/2025. Entries for NG472 and NG479 prepared for publication; biography of Turner and entries for NG130, NG472, NG479, NG681, NG925, NG1162, NG3044, NG6196-NG6197 and NG6544 proofread following mark-up and corrected.
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- Chicago style
- Egerton, Judy. “NG 6197, The Valley of the Dee, with Chester in the Distance, NG 6196, Holt Bridge on the River Dee”. 2000, online version 3, February 28, 2025. https://data.ng.ac.uk/0DUR-000B-0000-0000.
- Harvard style
- Egerton, Judy (2000) NG 6197, The Valley of the Dee, with Chester in the Distance, NG 6196, Holt Bridge on the River Dee. Online version 3, London: National Gallery, 2025. Available at: https://data.ng.ac.uk/0DUR-000B-0000-0000 (Accessed: 29 March 2025).
- MHRA style
- Egerton, Judy, NG 6197, The Valley of the Dee, with Chester in the Distance, NG 6196, Holt Bridge on the River Dee (National Gallery, 2000; online version 3, 2025) <https://data.ng.ac.uk/0DUR-000B-0000-0000> [accessed: 29 March 2025]