LONDON.- Dulwich Picture Gallery announced an important new acquisition: Viewing at Dulwich Picture Gallery, c.1830 by James Stephanoff (c.1788-1874). This delightful and fascinating watercolour is on display in the newly refurbished galleries featuring a complete rehang of the permanent collection from 11 June – 15 October 2013.

The watercolour shows the Gallery’s famous enfilade as it was in the 1830s. It was bought at auction at the ‘London sale’, Christie’s South Kensington for £3,200 hammer price on 3 September 2012. Dr Xavier Bray, Arturo and Holly Melosi Chief Curator at Dulwich Picture Gallery, said: “This is one of the earliest views of the Gallery’s enfilade we know and when Christie’s showed it to me, I knew it simply had to be acquired by the Gallery. Since this was the ‘London Sale’- with a double decker bus as the preceding lot - none of the usual dealers or collectors were present, which meant that I was almost alone bidding for it. Thanks to one of our Trustees, Johnny van Haeften, I was allowed to bid up to a certain amount. We are extremely grateful to both Johnny and Sarah van Haeften for funding the acquisition as well as the conservation and the re-framing of the work."

The watercolour has been placed at the end of the Gallery’s enfilade to replicate the view Stephanoff’s work depicts from Gallery V towards the former entrance in Gallery I. Some of the collection’s most celebrated works can clearly be identified, such as Gainsborough’s Linley Sisters hanging above the entrance, the recently restored Saint Cecilia, Murillo’s beloved Flower Girl and his Virgin of the Rosary. A woman sits before an easel in Gallery IV, a common sight in the nineteenth century when artists would travel to Dulwich to see Britain’s first public art gallery, while a group of distinguished visitors with guidebook in hand visit the Gallery.

The work is a key document which records how paintings such as Van Dyck’s Samson and Delilah and Titian’s workshop’s Venus and Adonis were hung in Gallery IV in a very dense cluster along a central line in the 1830s, reminiscent of the hanging practices at the Royal Academy. It also serves as evidence of how some of the paintings and pieces of furniture have changed over the past 180 years. To the left Veronese’s Saint Jerome and a Donor can be seen, before restoration in 1948 uncovered Saint Michael’s hand holding a balance and the lion at Saint Jerome’s feet, proof that the painting is in fact a fragment of a larger canvas.

The watercolour is likely to have been made soon after the Gallery’s architect, Sir John Soane, had the walls repainted in the distinctive ‘Soane Red’ (formerly the paint had been more ochre in colour). Dr Ian Bristow, an expert on historic paint colours, took samples of the original paint and had them matched when the Gallery was refurbished in 1999. The de-installation of ‘Murillo & Justino de Neve: The Art of Friendship’ has provided the perfect opportunity for the Gallery to repaint the enfilade with a Soane Red newly matched by Farrow and Ball to offset a new hang of the permanent collection.

The son of a Russian stage designer who settled in London, Stephanoff became the official ‘Historical Painter in Watercolours’ to William IV, where he painted incidents in the lives of famous painters such as Rubens, Van Dyck, Rosa and Titian. In 1820 he collaborated with A. Pugin on a large picture of George IV’s coronation. He also embarked on a series of drawings inspired by the British Museum. Examples of his work are held by the V&A: The Interior of the British Institution (1817) and the British Museum: The Virtuoso (1833).