In 1771 Simon Harcourt, the British Ambassador to France, bought a Rubens landscape, La Charrette embourbée, of a cart stuck on a boggy track, which was well-known in the eighteenth-century Parisian art world as one of the best pictures in the collection of the Marquis de Lassay. Once in England, and in the Harcourt collection at Nuneham Park, it was Sir Joshua Reynolds who cleaned and restored the picture. Simultaneously, a different version of the same composition was hanging at Houghton Hall and was then sold to Catherine the Great in 1779. In 1830 John Smith made an error and attributed the Lassay provenance to the Hermitage painting, since which point the Nuneham picture had increasingly been forgotten, and the presence of La Charrette embourbée in leading collections in France and in England, and the rich discourse that the picture provoked, had been entirely neglected. Subsequent research has, through x-rays, revealed pentimenti. It is the pentimenti of the cart-pusher's elbow and the repositioning of the back right-hand wheel, and the fact that the definitive version of the figure and the position of the wheel were only arrived at through changes which were then replicated in the Hermitage version, that indicate, firstly, Rubens’ autograph involvement, and secondly, that the Harcourt landscape set the precedent and was painted first. It is further noted that the panels of each version, which are the same size, were each made from two planks, but the Hermitage version is built up with six smaller sections on the top, bottom, and sides. This further indicates that the Harcourt landscape was painted first.

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