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Nicolaes Berchem (Haarlem 1620-Amsterdam 1683)

Italian Landscape with Figures and Animals: a Village on a Mountain Plateau Signed and dated 1655

Oil on panel | 32.5 x 44.0 cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external) | RCIN 404818

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  • Berchem (1620-83) was the son and presumably pupil of Pieter Claesz, a Haarlem painter of down-to-earth still lives. He also studied with a variety of artists, including Jan van Goyen, and became a prominent member of the Haarlem artistic community, on one occasion travelling to Germany with fellow townsman, Jacob van Ruisdael. The last decade of his life was spent in Amsterdam. Berchem painted some northern forest landscapes (like the one of the later 1640s in Dulwich Picture Gallery) of a type which this training and milieu might lead one to expect. The majority of his work however is Italianate, either inspired by an undocumented visit to Italy, which can only have occurred between 1651 and 1653, or by exposure to the work of returning Italianates such as Cornelis van Poelenburgh, Pieter van Laer, Jan Both and Jan Asselyn, all of whom were back home by the mid 1640s.

    This work belongs to a popular type – the small, jewel-like evocation of a hot Italian hillside – which ultimately derives from the work of Cornelis van Poelenburgh. The comparison perhaps makes Poelenburgh’s landscapes appear contrived in composition and mechanical in lighting. Berchem’s panorama has a daring openness which derives from a famous work by Asselyn of c.1650 (Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Vienna); his sky has Claude’s effect of space and luminosity through minimal transitions of colour and tone.

    The most striking effect of Berchem’s work however is the way that he has allowed the texture of the paint and the patterns of the brushstrokes to appear so strongly even in a work of such small scale. A few years later Samuel van Hoogstraten describes the advantages of this procedure: 'It is above all desirable that you should accustom yourself to a lively mode of handling so as to smartly express different planes and surfaces; giving the drawing due emphasis and the colouring, when it admits of it, a playful freedom, without ever proceeding to polishing or blending … it is better to aim at softness with a well-nourished brush … for, paint as thickly as you please, smoothness will, by subsequent operations, creep in of itself' (Introduction to the Art of Painting, 1678).

    Signed and dated lower left: 'Berghem/1655'
    Provenance

    Purchased by George IV from Sir Thomas Baring as part of a group of 86 Dutch and Flemish paintings, most of which were collected by Sir Thomas’s father, Sir Francis Baring; they arrived at Carlton House on 6 May 1814; recorded in the anti-room to the Dining Room at Carlton House in 1819 (no 109); in the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace in 1841 (no 24)

  • Medium and techniques

    Oil on panel

    Measurements

    32.5 x 44.0 cm (support, canvas/panel/stretcher external)


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