Studia Waweliana (5.1996)

A STUDY ON THE PAINTINGS OF THE ENGLISH SCHOOL IN THE COLLECTIONS OF THE WAWEL ROYAL
CASTLE LANDSCAPE WITH A COTTAGE AND A COUNTRY LANDSCAPE

Summary

The collection of English paintings that Leon Piniński
donated to the Wawel Royal Castle in the intern ar period is
of unąuestionable value by Polish standards. The pictures,
among which portraits pi'edominate, include two landscape
pieces, in the current state of research linked with John
Constable — the signed Landscape with a Cottage (fig. 1)
attributed to the artist himself and dated in the years 1828—1834
(the back of the sketch bears the attestation, in all pi-obability
from the second half of the 19th or early 20th century,
confirming the authorship of the picture and the presence of
a signature), and A Country Landscape (fig. 2) defined as a
work by his foliower, dating from the mid-19th century (in
1926 Piniński published the painting as a genuine Constable
signed with his initials).

The analysis of John Constable's oeuvre and of its reception
in the second half of the 19th century permits far-reaching
verification of hitherto accepted determinations, although the
conclusions presented here aro largely hypothetical. The es-
sential difficulty in studying the subject is the lack of collection
archives. Piniński's popular text discussing the collection, pub-
lished in „Tygodnik Ilustrowany" in 1926, allows us only to
state that the collector acąuired the paintings between about
1904 and 1914, also outside Great Britain. He considered them
weaker works by great masters; while giving no sources of
his attributions to particular authors, he admitted the possibility
of their being far too bold (in the 1937 inventory of the
collection the two discussed paintings were described as 19th
century copies after Constable).

The Landscape with a Cottage and A Country Landscape
belong to a group of fakes and imitations of the painting of
John Constable which were fabricated in Great Britain in the
second half of the 19th century. At the time the „discovery"
of the works of Constable - underestimated in his lifetime -
conditioned by complicated extemal circumstances, led to a
sharp rise in the financial value of his paintings. This was
accompanied by a large-scale practice of forging the artisfs
works. Nevertheless, the specific character of the materiał
accessible to the researcher of this process today allows only
the launching of hypotheses.

The investigations carried out by the present author indicate
that the Landscape with a Cottage is an example of forgeries
of the sketches of John Constable, so numerous in the second
half of the 19th century. The author of the Wawel picture
made a clumsy attempt to imitate the artisfs sketchy manner,
building the composition of iconographic motifs borrowed from
Constable's authentic works (in all probability after a drawing

at the British Museum, fig. 3). The hypothetical dating and
attribution of the Wawel sketch are interrelated. The stylistic
and iconographic analogies permit indication of the possible
authors of the Landscape with a Cottage: George Constable of
Arundel (the sketch, dated between c. 1837 and 1878, fig. 4),
an anonymous forger, creator of the painting On the Stour
(Castle Museum at Nottingham), perhaps working in James
Orrock's atelier which fabricated fake Constables (additional
concurrence of the shape of the letters of the signature on
the Wawel sketch dated between the 1880s and 1890s (fig. 5)
with Orrock's handwriting (fig. 23)) and the Master of Red
Signatures (additionally, a similar bmshwork in the sketch
dated as the second half of the 19th century, figs 7-12).
Supplementing the above hypotheses, we should mention
Thomas Churchyard (a rather doubtful hypothesis based on
the unconfirmed attribution of the picture in fig. 14) and
Joseph Paul (solely as the possible author of the Wawel sketch,
figs 15-16).

A Country Landscape (fig. 2), in turn, was painted after
mezzotints by David Lucas, as a synthesis of iconographic
motifs borrowed from the engravings The Glebę Farm, Hamp-
stead Head, Stormy Noon - Sa?id Diggers (fig. 17), and The
Bathers. Hanipstead Heath. This, combined with stylistic errors,
allows the picture to be accepted as the work of an imitator.
Let us recall, however, that Piniński published it as a signed
original, which does not rule out its being a fake. A Country
Landscape was most likely painted between the 1860s and
1880s, when forgeries and imitations after the Lucas mezzotints
were commonplace on the art market in Great Britain. Among
the probable authors of the Wawel painting should be mentioned
James Webb, an artist who also faked Constable's works
(including those after the Lucas mezzotints, fig. 18), and
Frederick Watts (owing to stylistic analogies, albeit Watts is
not known as a forger, figs 19-20). There are also analogies
to A Country Landscape - above all in the method of creating
a new Constable from some Lucas mezzotints - in a group of
anonymous fakes, one of which has been ascribed to the studio
of James Orrock (figs 21-22). Therefore, one may ventu7-e a
scholarly fantasy by launching the hypothesis that the two
Wawel paintings come from a single source (cf. above).

Although the Landscape with. a Cottage and A Country
Landscape in the Wawel collection are not genuine Constables,
they are all the same valued as evidence of the 19th century
reception of that artisfs output in the British Isles, of the
Victorian art market and, finally, of the fickleness of artistic
fashions.