The Samuel Butler Collection at Saint John's College, Cambridge / A Catalogue and a Commentary

by Henry Festing Jones; A. T. Bartholomew

SAMUEL BUTLER

64. Water-colour: copy of a landscape behind a small Madonna and Child by Bartolomeo Veneto, signed and dated 1505.

I forget the precise date, but I think it was about 1898, when Butler was searching in real landscape for the original of the castle which appears in the background of one of the Giovanni Bellini pictures of the Madonna and Child in the National Gallery, the one

with the bird on the tree and the man ploughing. It may now be attributed to some other Venetian painter. He would have been pleased if he could have found the original of the background of any picture by one of his favourite painters. This copy was made to fix in his mind the castle on the hill, which he hoped afterwards to identify with some real place. But he never succeeded.