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It is possible that NG 1878 is the Cattle exhibited by Schweickhardt at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, in 1794 (no. 316). The picture does not appear in the artist’s memorandum book for 1794 and was probably one of those he kept ‘on stock’. It conceivably appears in the artist’s posthumous sale at Phillips, London, 8 June 1799 (lot 81) with the title Cows with a View of a River and described approvingly in the catalogue as ‘capital’. That picture was purchased, along with ten others by Schweickhardt, for £14 14s. by William Devaynes (?1730–1809), MP, banker and former director of the East India Company, presumably for his residence at Turnham Green. The contents of the house were sold at Christie’s, London, on 9 April 1810; what had been lot 81 in Schweickhardt’s posthumous sale seems to have appeared in this sale as lot 59, River Scene with Cows, purchased for £5 7s. 6d. by one ‘Bentley’. If this picture corresponds to NG 1878, its ownership history is obscure for the six years until its possible reappearance in a sale of the collection of Joseph Wilkinson at Christie’s on 21 May 1816 as A Peasant watching a Group of Cows in a Landscape (lot 40). This latter picture can be securely identified as NG 1878, for it was purchased for £22 1s. by one ‘Hodges’, presumably the merchant William Hodges (died 1841), whose wife, Sarah Frances Hodges (died 1852), of 15 Cumberland Terrace, Regents Park, Middlesex, bequeathed the painting to the ÁùºÏ²ÊÔ¤²â.