Rural Landscape (after black chalk and India ink wash drawing by Pieter Molyn the Elder)

The Irish-born William Baillie took up printmaking shortly after leaving the British Army, in which he held the rank of captain. Dutch art was his particular interest. After visiting The Hague in 1763 to purchase works of art for aristocratic collections (as well as his own), Baillie went on to make many reproductive prints after these Dutch seventeenth-century drawings and paintings. His passion for Rembrandt’s etchings went so far as a reworking of the famed Hundred Guilder Print, the plate of which he owned. Already the source drawing for this Rural Landscape exemplifies some of the earlier history of exchange between British and Flemish artistic traditions. The draughtsman, Peter Molyn the Elder, was a native of Ghent who settled in England with his wife. Their son Peter Molyn the Younger, also an artist, is known as "the Londoner" in archival documents.