A rocky landscape with a fortified castle overlooking a river

This delicately painted view of a fortified castle on a mountainous bluff is the only surviving signed and dated landscape by Jan Lievens. By 1651, when Lievens completed this scene, he was already an established artist having served at the court King Charles I in London, produced altarpieces for Jesuit churches in Antwerp, and history paintings for important civic buildings in Lieden and Amsterdam. Throughout his career Lievens emulated his peers in his work, adapting elements from those he most admired and incorporating them into his own works. Here, he borrows the romantic spirit of Jacob van Ruisdael's landscapes and combines it with his own unique handling of paint and limited palette, which is consistent with other works executed by the artist in the 1640s and '50s, evidenced by his Landscape with Hagar and the Angel in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rouen. The composition is quite typical of Lievens landscapes, with the complicated passage of the rocky outcropping and castle anchoring one side of the composition and a middle ground that has been partially obscured by natural elements (trees, hills, etc.).

While this painting has long been considered an autograph work by Lievens on the grounds of style and on the basis of the presence of his monogram lower left, it was excluded from the artist's monographs by Hans Schneider (1932), Rudi Ekkart (1973) and Werner Sumowski (1983), probably because it emerged after the publication of Schneider's foundational text and was unavailable to subsequent authors. Dr. Llyod Dewitt plans to include the present painting in his forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's works.