JOHN CROME
British, 1768–1821
The Old Windmill
Oil on canvas
43½ x 62 inches (110.5 x 157.5 cm)
Framed: 50 x 69 inches (127 x 175 cm)
The windmill depicted in this landscape resembles Sprowston Old Mill, with Norwich in the distance, which Crome depicted in a small panel, measuring 13 x 19 inches, sold at Christie’s, London on 27 April, 1897, and again on 28 July, 1909 (see Derek and Timothy Clifford, John Crome, London, 1968, p. 180).
A photograph of the present work from the Library of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is now held in the Crome archive of the Frick Art Reference Library, New York.
Provenance
Blakeslee Galleries, New York, by 1904
Judge Samuel L. Bronson, New Haven, Connecticut (sale, American Art Association, New York, 9 March, 1907, lot 72, sold for $5,100)
Theron J. Blakeslee, Blakeslee Galleries, New York, acquired at the above sale
Literature
“Famous Old Masters Brought to America,” The New York Times, 30 October, 1904, “an old Crome, with windmill and a heavy cart piled with tree trunks and drawn by a string of horses, the ocean to the right and a sky full of such energetic masses of dark and white cloud as one rarely sees in the old Norwich master’s canvases.”
The New York Times, 16 March, 1907
American Art Annual, New York, vol. VI, 1907-08, p. 49
$85,000