Landscape with figures

Physical description

A tambourinist dances in a landscape accompanied by another female musician and two goatherds resting with their flock. A steep track leads up a hill to the left while the landscape gives way to a valley and and a building atop one of the distant hills at right

Place of Origin

Holland (painted)

Date

18th century (painted)

Artist/maker

Berchem, Nicolaes (the Elder), born 1620 - died 1683 (follower of, painted by)

Materials and Techniques

Oil on oak panel

Marks and inscriptions

'The landscape by john Both and the Figures by Andrew Both his Brother'

Dimensions

Height: 31 cm estimate, Width: 38 cm estimate

Object history note

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: Nicolaes Berchem (1620-1683) was a Dutch painter, draughtsman and etcher and was one of the most talented, versatile and well-paid artists of his time. A prolific member of the second generation of Dutch italianates, he also produced scenes of his native landscape. From the 1650s he began making landscapes in a purely Italianate style, characterized by more varied and saturated colours, some of which are reminiscent of the work of Jan Both. His figures became more elegant and attenuated and the scenes, often idealizing rural life, are pervaded by a warm southern light. 537-1870 combines a number of elements common in Berchem's oeuvre, including the warm light, fluid handling, distant vistas, shepherds and imposing trees. This work closely resembles Berchem’s Lanscape with Bentheim Castle from 1650 from the collection of the Duke of Westminster which also includes a dancing tambourine player with flowing draperies, a seated woman holding an instrument, reclining goatherds at the foot of a steep hill in a landscape giving way to distant hills with a fortified building on a hill at the far right. 537-1870 appears to be a reduced variation of these elements in a cooler, less vibrant colour palette and in a less masterful hand.The dimiuative dancing figures in a vast landscape also recall the works of Claude Lorrain such as in the Landscape with ethe marriage of Isaac and Rebecca' or 1648 (National Gallery, London NG12). Claude was greatly imitated in the late 17th early 18th centuries by artists with a nostalgic desire to construct a historical fantasy of life in the Golden Age. What united these primarily foreign artists working in Rome was a fixation on the self-contained ideal world created by Claude’s pictures at the expense of their naturalistic and poetic qualities; the result, predictably, was a consistent, if not unattractive artificiality.

Historical context note

Dutch Italianate landscapes such as this were particularly popular in the 17th through to the early 19th centuries. The term conventionally refers to the school of Dutch painters and draughtsmen who were active in Rome for more than a hundred years. 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, 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 Nicolaes Berchem or Jan 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 partly 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.

Descriptive line

Oil Painting, 'Landscape with Figures', Follower of Nicolaes Berchem, 18th C

Bibliographic References (Citation, Note/Abstract, NAL no)

Kauffmann, C.M., Catalogue of Foreign Paintings, I. Before 1800, London: Victoria and Albert Museum, 1973, p. 98, cat. no. 109
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