.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
Little is known about Van den Berghe and his oeuvre was for the first time only initially clarified when in 1956 Laurens Bol ascribed to him a small group of pictures, bearing the monogram 'CVB', formerly given to an anonymous monogrammist (L.J. Bol, Oud Holland, LXXI, 1956, pp. 183-95). Only around a dozen firmly attributed pictures by the artist have been identified, of which the majority are flower pieces.
Van den Berghe's landscapes are firmly rooted in what Bol terms the 'Middelburg-Brueghel' tradition of landscape painting that grew up in that city in the second decade of the seventeenth century. He was strongly influenced by the work of Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne who was in Zeeland between 1614-25: the latter's Landscape with the Parable of the Prodigal Son of 1617 (Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen) clearly demonstrates that artistic debt in the fancifully attired figures, the imaginary architecture and the crisp handling of the trees. These motifs recur in Van den Berghe's signed summer landscapes: see for example the work in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and that exhibited from a German private collection, Masters of Middelburg, Amsterdam, Kunsthandel K. & V. Waterman, March 1984, pp. 234-5, no. 59, in which the standing figure of the lutanist is closely comparable to that seated in the present work
Van den Berghe's landscapes are firmly rooted in what Bol terms the 'Middelburg-Brueghel' tradition of landscape painting that grew up in that city in the second decade of the seventeenth century. He was strongly influenced by the work of Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne who was in Zeeland between 1614-25: the latter's Landscape with the Parable of the Prodigal Son of 1617 (Kassel, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen) clearly demonstrates that artistic debt in the fancifully attired figures, the imaginary architecture and the crisp handling of the trees. These motifs recur in Van den Berghe's signed summer landscapes: see for example the work in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, and that exhibited from a German private collection, Masters of Middelburg, Amsterdam, Kunsthandel K. & V. Waterman, March 1984, pp. 234-5, no. 59, in which the standing figure of the lutanist is closely comparable to that seated in the present work