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P & D Colnaghi & Co Ltd
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JOHANNES LINGELBACH (1622-1674)
An extensive river landscape with peasants resting by a shack and horses pulling a boat
( Netherlands
c. 1650
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Medium
Oil on canvas
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Dimensions
104.20cm wide
89.90cm high
(41.02 inches wide 35.39 inches high)
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Provenance
Charles T. D. Crews Esq., D.L., J.P., F.S.A. (1839-1915), Billingbear Park, Wokingham, Berks; Christie’s, London, 1-2 July 1915 [=1st day], lot 43 (8 gns. to Holzafal); Dr. R.C.A. van Buren; His sale, J. Vermeulen, Amsterdam, 31 October 1916; Jacques Goudstikker, Amsterdam, 1919; Looted by the Nazi authorities, July 1940; Recovered by the Allies, 1945; In the custody of the Dutch Government; Restituted in February 2006 to the heir of Jacques Goudstikker.
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Literature:
C. Burger-Wegener, Johannes Lingelbach 1622-1674, Berlin, 1976, p. 274, no. 98; Old Master Paintings: An illustrated summary catalogue, Rijksdienst Beeldende Kunst (The Netherlandish Office for the Fine Arts), The Hague, 1992, p. 178, no. 1503, ill.
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Exhibition History:
The Hague, Schilderkundig Genootschap Pulchri Studio, Catalogue de la Collection Goudstikker d’Amsterdam, 1919, no. 65.
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Description / Expertise
This broad sweeping landscape shows Lingelbach’s great interest in the Italian countryside and the everyday lives of its inhabitants. The artist was in Rome from 1647 to 1649 and would have experienced first-hand the warm, golden Mediterranean light that suffuses this composition. Before this timeless vista, Lingelbach places travellers and peasants, individualized in the manner of the Bamboccianti, a group of artists (of which he was one) who painted small-scale genre scenes in the manner of Pieter van Laer, il Bamboccio. Despite its strongly Italianate feel, the Colnaghi landscape may have in fact been painted after Lingelbach’s return from Rome in 1650 to Amsterdam, where there was a keen interest in southern landscapes among collectors. The staffage in our picture, particularly the horses, may have been influenced by the works of Philips Wouwermans, under whose influence Lingelbach fell in the 1650s.
Although German by birth, Lingelbach spent most of his life in the Netherlands. By 1634 his family had settled in Amsterdam, where presumably he trained as a painter. According to Houbraken, he visited France in 1642 and arrived in Italy two years later, where he is recorded in Rome from 1647 to 1649. There Lingelbach was greatly influenced by the landscape and light and became a member of the Bamboccianti. He is perhaps the only one of the Dutch Italianates with a corpus of numerous signed and dated works to document his artistic development. The first two signed works are Blacksmith (1650, Rome, Melmeluzzi Collection, Rome) and Self-portrait with violin (1650, Kunsthaus, Zurich). Unfortunately no certain works survive from the previous years, although Kren attributed a series of works depicting Roman trades, some formerly ascribed to Pieter van Laer, to Lingelbach’s early career. However, despite some similarities between these works and the Melmeluzzi Blacksmith and the signed Dentist on horseback (1651, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), it is still uncertain whether they belong to Lingelbach’s pre-1650 work or are by another hand (sometimes called the Master of the Trades).
In the following years, Lingelbach painted large-scale compositions that are his best-known works, such as Carnival (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), and many pictures of bustling Mediterranean port scenes. Following his return to Amsterdam in 1650, he enjoyed continued success, producing Italianate scenes that satisfied the growing demand among northern collectors for paintings that evoked the atmosphere of Rome and the Mediterranean. Impressions of Rome and its environs were very popular in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century and Lingelbach’s work helped to foster this taste, to the point that artists like Dirk Stoop were able to produce Italianate landscapes for the market without ever leaving home.
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