12 June 2024
Andrew Watson
Synopsis
The amazing and little-known story of the Glasgow-born chemical engineer Daniel Wilson, who, in 1820, settled in Paris where he played a major role in launching the French industrial revolution. From his vast profits he formed a remarkable art collection, which numbered over 350 works. It included Dutch, Flemish, Italian, and Spanish old masters, and was distinguished particularly by the outstanding quality of its French nineteenth-century pictures. Drawing on recent research, Andrew will show that Wilson acquired old master paintings from celebrated Paris collections and that his taste for Spanish seventeenth-century pictures was especially important. A particular focus of his talk will be on how he established himself as a pioneering collector of Barbizon School pictures and his friendship with Eugène Delacroix, which led to the acquisition of the artist’s masterpiece, The Death of Sardanapalus. This guaranteed Wilson’s reputation as a major patron of French art and as Delacroix’s most important British patron.
CV
Dr Andrew Watson is an Associate Lecturer with the Open University and an art historian specialising in 19th-century British collecting of French art. He has written and lectured widely, with publications for the Louvre, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and The
Burlington Magazine in addition to talks for the Burrell and Wallace collections, Kelvingrove Museum, National Gallery of Scotland, and Brussels National Museum.
Last year’s February edition of the Burlington featured an article that he wrote on the provenance of Vermeer’s important early work, A Maid Asleep (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York), which coincided with the opening of the Vermeer exhibition at the Rijksmuseum.
In addition, he has published an article on Daniel Wilson for the Louvre and has just had a piece published in this May’s edition of the Burlington Magazine which reveals new information on Wilson’s friendship with the great French romantic painter, Eugène Delacroix.