RKD STUDIES

In London in 1823, Adriaan van der Willigen visited the Scottish art collector John Murray (c. 1768-1827), whom he had met before when the latter was traveling in the Netherlands in 1819. Rather than buying works at the London art market, the Scottish collector profited from direct sales from Dutch collections and visits to artists’ studios, as can be seen from his travel accounts, published anonymously in 1824.¹ Murray’s collection was, according to Van der Willigen, ‘not extensive, but one finds fine paintings there’.² Van der Willigen saw Italian, Flemish and Dutch pictures, among them work by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), Gerard Dou (1613-1675), Adam Pijnacker (1620-1673) and Aelbert Cuyp. There were also works by contemporary artists Pieter Christoffel Wonder (1777-1852), Jan Hendrik Verheijen (1778-1846) and Balthasar Paul Ommeganck (1755-1826). In fact, Pieter Christoffel Wonder was present in London when Van der Willigen visited. The artist had just finished a genre piece featuring Sir and Lady Murray in an interior filled with old master pictures.³ Wonder and Murray had met in Utrecht, where Murray visited the painter’s studio. Whilst in the Netherlands, Murray may also have seen the work of Verheyen, who also lived in Utrecht. He compared the two townsmen in his journal.⁴

The exhibition P.C. Wonder (1777-1852) : Een Utrechter in Londen (= An artist from Utrecht in London) in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, thoroughly investigated the life and work of Wonder, and his British adventure. It is worth addressing and expanding this material in this essay. Presumably, Wonder was in London on a preliminary journey in 1823. On Murray’s invitation he moved to the British capital in 1824 and stayed for eight years. The collector commissioned several paintings from him and also introduced him to prosperous acquaintances. Work poured in. His friend the writer Christiaan Kramm (1797-1875) wrote of Wonder’s time in England: ‘He has completed important work and depicted many people of the English nobility, in conversation pieces, along the lines of Terburg [= Gerard ter Borch (1617-1681)]'.⁵ Soon, the London art market showed interest. The portrait painter and art dealer William Armfield Hobday (1771-1831) invited Wonder to his sale exhibition of living masters at his ‘Gallery of Modern Art’ on 54 Pall Mall.⁶ Three years after his arrival in the city, Wonder could afford a larger home and moved to a grand residency on 35 Great Marlborough Street in the centre of Westminster. He painted the spacious entrance in 1828 [2]. In a large hallway, an elegant gentleman is greeted by a cheerful spaniel. The visitor has taken off his top hat and brought along game from hunting. Besides the reference to a fine lifestyle – the dog, the hat, the game – the painting reveals an important contact of the artist. As Liesbeth Helmus has pointed out, the little notecard tied to the hare reads ‘from Stidbourn [estate?] P.C. Wonder 35 Gt. Marlbor[.] St’. It refers to Sudbourn Hall, the estate of the politician and art collector Frances Seymour-Conway, 3rd Marquess of Hertford (1777-1842), whose family collection is one of the foundations of the Wallace Collection.⁷ Today, however, no works by Wonder are kept in this London museum.

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Pieter Christoffel Wonder
The stairwell of the painter's London home at Great Marlboroughstreet no. 35, dated 1828
Utrecht, Centraal Museum, inv./cat.nr. 19775

To promote his work, Wonder also exhibited at the London exhibitions. The year of his arrival, he sent in two portraits to the Royal Academy of Arts (no. 106, Portrait of a gentleman and no. 118 Portrait of a Lady, presented in ‘the Great Room’).⁸ His participation at the British Institution, founded in 1805, was more extensive, exhibiting 18 paintings between 1826 and 1831 with titles ranging from ‘A Dutch yard’ or ‘Dutch fish market’ to ‘Do not awake her’, ‘Waiting for an answer’ and ‘The favourite bird’.⁹ The original paintings have not so far been identified, but the titles suggest anecdotal genre pictures, reminiscent of those by, for example, the Leiden Fijnschilders (Leiden fine painters). Paintings like the undated Seller of herring and vegetables with her wares, sitting before a shop [3] or The Game of Triktrak [4], dated around 1827, may give an impression. A remarkable exception within his exhibited work is his last submission at the British Institution in 1831: no. 345, ‘An interior of a picture gallery with portraits’ [5]. The painting was a commission from Murray, showing a group of esteemed art collectors of the day in an imaginary art gallery with a compilation of artworks from famous collections of old masters in England. Wonder’s self-portrait can be detected behind the group of men in the lower left. In this ambitious painting, reminiscent of the many picture galleries painted in Antwerp in the 17th century, Wonder depicted the prestige of British collecting, a celebration of the rich holdings of old master painting in Britain. ¹⁰

Wonder owed a great debt to the Dutch old masters. A reviewer of The Morning Post wrote of his work at the exhibition at the British Institution of 1829: ‘He unites the good drawing of his school with the colouring of the old masters and has succeeded very well in his imitation of the style of Rembrandt, Pieter de Hooch and Schalcken, who are so universally admired in this country’.¹¹ While Kramm compared Wonder’s work with the refined genre pieces by Gerard ter Borch, the London reviewer recognised other 17th-century masters in his painting. The work he made during his time in England can thus be viewed as strongly reminiscent of the Dutch old masters and successful as such.

5
Pieter Christoffel Wonder
Patrons and lovers of art, c. 1826-1830
Private collection