Jean François Millet

Wooded Landscape with Diana Hunting - 17thC Old Master French art oil painting

circa 1675

This superb Dutch Old Master Golden Age oil painting is attributed to Pieter Bodding van Laer. Painted circa 1635 the composition is a group of travellers who have stopped to rest. I...

This superb 17th century Dutch Golden Age oil painting has been more recently reattributed to Abraham Begeyn by Dr Marijke C. de Kinkelder formerly of the RKD - Netherlands Institute...

This stunning British Old Master exhibited pastoral oil on panel is by noted artist James Ward. Painted circa 1815 with superb provenance, it was exhibited posthumously at the Royal ...

This superb Dutch 17th century Golden Age Old Master cityscape oil painting of Amsterdam is by noted artist Jacobus Storck. Painted circa 1670, the composition is a Dutch Amsterdam h...

A delicate oil on canvas landscape capriccio of an Arcadian landscape with figures and sheep and goats in the foreground. A stormy sky and blasted tree populate the landscape and the...

This superb Dutch Old Master marine oil painting is attributed to the circle of Jacob de Heusch. Painted circa 1690 the setting is an Italian coast with fisherfolk in the foreground....

Painted in collaboration with Hendrick van Balen (Antwerp, 1575 – 1632). Provenance: Private Collection, Uruguay, since the 1930s. The eldest son of Jan Br...

Provenance: The Marchesi Strozzi, Palazzo Strozzi, Florence Sale, Christie’s, London, May 20, 1993, lot 315, as by Carl Borromaus Andreas Ruthart...

"River Landscape with a Windmill and Chapel" is a painting by Dutch Old Master Painter, Jan van Goyen. There are traces of a signature on the bow of the boat...

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...

A fine framed oil on canvas painting by the renowned artist William Sidney coope.Signed and dated 91 lower left. This painting depicts 3 cows resting by a river, a village with hous...

Amaizing 19' century Roman landscape depicting a part of Villa Borghese with Trinità dei Monti. With a finely carved gilt wood coeval frame. Measurements with frame cm 65 x78 wit...