Oil Painting, 'Arch of a Bridge with Peasants and Cattle', manner of Nicolaes Berchem, late 17th century

An Italianate landscape dominated by an arched bridge with a peasant and his cattle resting beside a pond.

Bequeathed by John M. Parsons

Bequeathed by John M. Parsons, 1870
John Meeson Parsons (1798-1870), art collector, was born in Newport, Shropshire. He later settled in London, and became a member of the stock exchange. His interest in railways led to his election as an associate of the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1839, and he was director or chairman of two railway companies between 1843 and 1848. Much of his time however was spent collecting pictures and works of art. In his will he offered his collection of mostly German and Dutch schools to the National Gallery (which selected only three works) and to the Department of Science and Art at South Kensington, later the Victoria and Albert Museum. The South Kensington Museum acquired ninety-two oil paintings and forty-seven watercolours. A number of engravings were also left to the British Museum.

Historical significance: Originally catalogued as by Nicolaes Berchem, this painting is a late 18th or early 19th century copy of a well-known composition now in a private collection in Berlin. Berchem was long praised by collectors and at least another copy, however less detailed, had been made after the original, sold in Stockholm in 1981. Nicolaes Berchem is best known for his imaginary Italianate landscapes as a member of the second generation of Dutch Italianate landscapists. This painting is a good example of his prolific output that includes a great diversity of themes including history and genre paintings. In his landscapes however the figures, if not playing a secondary role, are as important as the panoramic setting. In this painting, the architectural element plays an essential structuring, a feature that is recurrent in few other paintings such as Peasants by a Roman ruins in the Mauritshuis, The Hague or Italian ruins in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. It is a good example of how Dutch Italianate painters challenged the traditional division between figural and landscape painting and merged both categories of genre and landscape paintings.
The quotation of the spinario is an important characteristic although it is not certain whether Berchem actually went to Italy or stayed in the Netherlands and knew Italy through the drawings of artists once they were back in Holland.
This copy is a good example of Berchem's popularity over the century as he was still fashionable during the mid-19th century.

Italianate landscapes were particularly praised during the 17th century up to the early 19th century. The term conventionally refers to the school of Dutch painters and draughtsmen who were active in Rome for more than a hundred years, starting from the early 17th century. These artists produced mainly pastoral subjects bathed in warm southern light, set in an Italian, or specifically Roman, landscape. The term is also often applied, but wrongly, to artists who never left the northern Netherlands but who worked primarily in an Italianate style. Eighteenth-century collectors, especially French ones, preferred a view by Berchem or Both to a scene of the Dutch country side by Jacob van Ruisdael for instance. The taste for the Italianates continued undiminished into the 19th century. An early voice denouncing these artists was that of John Constable in 1836 and at the end of the century Italianates had lost favour oartly because of the rise of Impressionism and the appreciation of the Dutch national school of landscape expounded by such eminent critics as Wilhem von Bode, E.W. Moes and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot.

Nicolaes Berchem (1620-1683) may have trained in Haarlem with Jan van Goyen. He was a prolific painter (about 850 paintings), draughtsman and etcher. He joined the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1642. From the mid-1650s until his death, Berchem shuttled back and forth between Haarlem and Amsterdam where he died in 1683.

This work is a good example of Berchem's typical Italianate landscapes: the arched bridge, which shade offers a nice resting spot for the peasants at work in this sunny Mediterranean day, slightly enhances the sense of perspective such as in many Berchem's compositions. The animals and figures are accurately depicted, especially the shepherd resting by the pond, whose gesture suggests a quotation of a well-known and most copied Roman sculpture, the so-called spinario, of which a plaster copy belongs to the V&A collection. The interaction between the figures and the setting illustrates Berchem's ability in both figural and landscape painting.

551-1870