A landscape with brigands attacking a rider

This large canvas is a notable example of Jan Wijnants’ approach to landscape painting following his move to Amsterdam in 1660. Typical of his mature works is the blasted tree with highly stylized foliage that dominates the right foreground. From his Haarlem colleague Jacob van Ruisdael, Wijnants appropriated the fallen tree trunk that creates a striking diagonal to guide the viewer’s eye to the dirt path where the central narrative of brigands attacking a rider unfolds. Like many landscapists of his generation, Wijnants at times collaborated with artists like Philips Wouwerman, who executed the figures in this landscape.

The same building that appears in this painting’s central background can be found in two later works: the artist’s Landscape with the Good Samaritan of 1670 (The State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; see Eisele, op. cit., no. 1) and, from a different angle, a small canvas with a hawking party dated 1667 (offered Christie’s, London, 9 July 1999, lot 11; see Eisele, op. cit., no. 58).

Wijnants’ paintings appealed greatly to collectors in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the present painting has a particularly distinguished early provenance. Its earliest recorded owner was Johannes Lubbeling, whose collection was praised by the German painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein following a visit to Amsterdam as having ‘many excellent paintings, all in as good condition as when they came from the hands of the masters’ (quoted in S. Rehm, Tischbein und die Kunst des ‘Goldenen Zeitalters’: Rezeptionsgeschichte(n) um 1800, Heidelberg, 2020, p. 78). At the end of the eighteenth century the painting belonged to Louis-Antoine-Auguste, duc de Rohan-Chabot and Jacques Philippe, duc de Choiseul-Stainville, the younger brother of Étienne François, duc de Choiseul. By 1835, it was in the collection of Baron Johan Gijsbert Verstolk van Soelen in The Hague. Verstolk’s collection was one of the finest assembled in its time and was acquired en bloc by the British bankers Samuel Jones-Loyd, 1st Baron Overstone, Humphrey St. John-Mildmay and Thomas Baring, with this painting allocated to Mildmay.