Lot Essay
This impeccably well-preserved painting by the leading Italianate landscapist of the first half of the seventeenth century belongs to a group of eight unusually large-scale pictures that Both executed in the final years of his life. Currently, only one of these paintings is in private hands. The other six are today in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig. 1); Alte Pinakothek, Munich; Palazzo Pitti, Florence; Louvre, Paris; Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen and Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and the present painting (see J.D. Burke, op. cit., p. 174, note 37). Datable on stylistic grounds to the final years of Both’s life, this painting has an unbroken provenance going back to its original commission by the Clifford family of Amsterdam circa 1650 and has passed through only three collections in its nearly four centuries of existence.
The painting’s exceptional quality has been duly recognised by all critics since the early nineteenth century. It was first described by an anonymous author writing in the June 1815 issue of The Sporting Magazine, who praised it as a ‘beautiful landscape [that] presents an extensive distance tastefully diversified’. The author heaped particular praise on the ‘singular and luxuriant display of trees, plants, and herbages, most correctly drawn, and so curiously painted’ as well as the ‘judicious introduction of an interesting groupe of nine figures,’ which ‘add considerable interest to the scene’ (op. cit., p. 103). Writing a decade later in his Portraits of Celebrated Painters, John Corner described Both’s paintings as ‘little inferior’ to those of Claude Lorrain. He went on to describe this example – the only one he explicitly referenced in his biography – as ‘[a]n exquisite one’ that, perhaps indicating the author’s (if ultimately factually inaccurate) esteem for it, ‘was given to him [Dundas], when on a diplomatic mission, by the late King of France’ (op. cit.). In 1835, the connoisseur and dealer John Smith likewise described the painting as a ‘capital picture’ and claimed that, while it achieved £504 at the 1794 sale, it was ‘[n]ow worth double that sum’ (op. cit.).
Continental commentators of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared the high appraisal of the painting expressed by their British forebears. This painting was one of a select few works by Both that Charles Blanc highlighted in his biography on the artist for his Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, among them the nearly comparably-sized canvas of circa 1645-50 that is today in the Louvre, Paris (fig. 2). While Blanc appears to have known our painting exclusively through the 1794 engraving by John Browne (1741-1801), he was nevertheless able to speak eloquently ‘to the majesty, to the grandeur of the foliage, to the irregular beauty of the gnarled, twisted trunks, to the beautiful masses of thickets which announce the end of a high forest and which will die on the shore’ (op. cit., p. 5; ‘à la majesté, à la grandeur des feuillages, à l’irrégulière beauté des troncs noueux, tordus, aux belles masses de taillis qui annoncent la fin d’une haute forêt et qui vont mourir sur le rivage’). The landscape was similarly referenced by both Alfred von Wurzbach and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the latter of whom perhaps understated the case by describing it simply as an ‘important painting’ in Both’s oeuvre (op. cit.; ‘Bedeutendes Bild’).
In a sun-filled Italian landscape, two groups of trees rise the full height of the canvas at center and right as a dirt path recedes diagonally from the painting’s left foreground. The path passes behind the central grouping before zigzagging back as it hugs the shoreline of a lake that in the nineteenth century was traditionally identified as Lake Bolsena in central Italy. A group of eight figures adds a touch of local color as they make their way in the painting’s foreground, while a herder guides his cow in the distance. A rocky escarpment and several low-lying mountains rise in the distance, before which a solitary structure sits along the water’s edge. Though painted in Holland, the verisimilitude of the landscape confirms Both’s intimate familiarity with Italy, which he encountered firsthand during a sojourn south of the Alps between circa 1638 and 1642.
Many early commentators, including the anonymous author in The Sporting Magazine, Smith, Blanc and von Wurzbach, described the painting as a collaboration between Jan and his elder brother, Andries, who they suggested provided the figures. However, modern scholarship has put the lie to this train of thought, as the picture almost assuredly post-dates Andries’s death in 1642. In his entry on the painting for the seminal Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, Peter C. Sutton convincingly argued for a dating of circa 1650 (op. cit.).
While precisely dating Both’s paintings is difficult owing to the paucity of securely dated works – only one painting, the Landscape with Mercury and Argus of 1650 in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich is dated (inv. no. 140) – comparison with the painting in Munich as well as paintings like the Scene of the Roman Campagna in the Indianapolis Museum of Art (inv. no. 55.225), which has traditionally been dated to circa 1647, all but confirm the suggestion that this example dates to circa 1650. The painting’s size, its deep green palette and the lush, large-scale foliage are all hallmarks of Both’s approach to painting in the final years of his life. Moreover, in his 1976 dissertation on the artist, James D. Burke described the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston painting as ‘a large-size remake of the painting in Indianapolis…with intensified color, wider tonal effects, more heroic scale, refined composition and without obvious repoussoirs’ (op. cit.). The Indianapolis painting, therefore, provides a terminus post quem for ours.
In addition to Browne’s engraving, two painted copies, one in a private collection in Cornwall and another in the collection of N.G. Harmer, Hastings, Sussex, are known (see J.D. Burke, op. cit., under no. 12).
A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
Rarely is a picture so well-documented as this ambitious landscape. The painting caused something of a sensation when it was offered by the Clifford family in Amsterdam on 10 November 1762. A letter dated 18 October from the Boston-born artist, agent and dealer, John Greenwood (1727-1792), to Sir Lawrence Dundas, on whose behalf Greenwood would ultimately acquire the painting with the assistance of the Amsterdam-based dealer Pierre Fouquet, Jr. (1729-1800), emphatically conveys the contemporary esteem for it:
Sir, I make bold to send you inclosed a Catalogue of Pictures which will be sold here ye 10th of ye ensuing mo – if any thing therein should please you, you’ll be kind enô to let me know it in time – those pieces marked thus + + are excellent – and thus + very good with y 0 – good pictures but not so extradionary [sic] – The No. 17 – a Landscape by Jan Both (iii) is a Masterpiece in its kind – and if you have now a mind of forming yr Cabinet I can collect 10 or 12 good pictures from this Sale – those 2 pictures I mention’d in my last I have pact’t and sent to Mr. Craufurd on whom I have drawn for ye amount £375 holl. Which hope will not be displeasing to you – as I am fully persuaded they are real good pieces and well worth ye money.
I am Sir with Respect
ymost Obt. Ser.
Jno. Greenwood
Dundas subsequently delivered instructions for Greenwood to participate in the sale and, on December 10, Greenwood sent his client a long letter which included an invoice amounting to f 4,506, which included his five percent commission and shipping costs. In addition to the Both, which, at f 944, cost nearly twice as much as the next most valuable painting – a ‘Galant’ for f 500 by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout – Dundas acquired precisely the types of works that were fashionable in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. These included two paintings by Philips Wouwerman and Jan(?) Griffier as well as one each by Jan van Huysum, Aelbert Cuyp and Ludolf Bakhuizen.
Dundas financed his collection by the enormous fortune he had amassed as a merchant and contractor, in part by becoming Commissary-General of the Army in Scotland, Flanders and Germany during the Seven Years War and also through successful speculation on the Stock Exchange. Though described by James Boswell in 1780 as ‘a comely, jovial Scottish gentleman of good address but not bright parts,’ Dundas proved his discernment in the arts by assembling an extraordinary collection of pictures, notably those of the Dutch and Flemish schools, as evidenced by the portrait he commissioned of himself and his grandson, the future Earl of Zetland, from Johan Zoffany in 1769⁄70 (fig. 3). The fashionable interior of the townhouse at 19 Arlington Street in London, which was renovated by Robert Adam and furnished by London’s finest cabinetmaker, Thomas Chippendale, depicted in Zoffany’s double portrait is adorned with no fewer than fourteen paintings. At center above the fireplace is Jan van de Cappelle’s Shipping Becalmed (Cardiff, National Museum of Wales), which Dundas acquired from Greenwood shortly after purchasing the Both. The painting’s grand carved and gilt frame is precisely the profile that is retained on our painting. The frame's design has traditionally been attributed to the neoclassical architect, interior designer and furniture designer Robert Adam, while the carving is by the preeminent London carver Sefferin Alken, whose projects included work for Houghton (1764, 1769 and 1771), Somerset House (1777-83), Blenheim Palace (1778) and Woburn Abbey. The van de Cappelle is in turn flanked by three paintings by Cuyp, two marines by Jan van de Velde, a landscape by Adam Pynacker and, at the bottom, two long paintings formerly believed to be by Veronese that are now known to be Netherlandish copies. On the opposite wall are two paintings by David Teniers II.
Dundas’s son and heir, Thomas, must have placed great value on the present painting, for it was one of only four lots he reacquired for the family at the 1794 sale. These included a portrait of Ann Boleyn given to Hans Holbein the Younger; a painting by Philips Wouwerman, known today exclusively through a copy (Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia) and Nicolas Poussin’s Crucifixion (Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), the last of which achieved the same exceptional price as our landscape. These two works were understandably among the most expensive in the sale, exceeded only by three lots: Nature and her followers by Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery), a Village festival by David Teniers the Younger and Rembrandt’s magisterial Portrait of Cornelis Claesz. Anslo and his wife, Aaltje Schouten (fig. 4; Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).
The painting’s exceptional quality has been duly recognised by all critics since the early nineteenth century. It was first described by an anonymous author writing in the June 1815 issue of The Sporting Magazine, who praised it as a ‘beautiful landscape [that] presents an extensive distance tastefully diversified’. The author heaped particular praise on the ‘singular and luxuriant display of trees, plants, and herbages, most correctly drawn, and so curiously painted’ as well as the ‘judicious introduction of an interesting groupe of nine figures,’ which ‘add considerable interest to the scene’ (op. cit., p. 103). Writing a decade later in his Portraits of Celebrated Painters, John Corner described Both’s paintings as ‘little inferior’ to those of Claude Lorrain. He went on to describe this example – the only one he explicitly referenced in his biography – as ‘[a]n exquisite one’ that, perhaps indicating the author’s (if ultimately factually inaccurate) esteem for it, ‘was given to him [Dundas], when on a diplomatic mission, by the late King of France’ (op. cit.). In 1835, the connoisseur and dealer John Smith likewise described the painting as a ‘capital picture’ and claimed that, while it achieved £504 at the 1794 sale, it was ‘[n]ow worth double that sum’ (op. cit.).
Continental commentators of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shared the high appraisal of the painting expressed by their British forebears. This painting was one of a select few works by Both that Charles Blanc highlighted in his biography on the artist for his Histoire des peintres de toutes les écoles, among them the nearly comparably-sized canvas of circa 1645-50 that is today in the Louvre, Paris (fig. 2). While Blanc appears to have known our painting exclusively through the 1794 engraving by John Browne (1741-1801), he was nevertheless able to speak eloquently ‘to the majesty, to the grandeur of the foliage, to the irregular beauty of the gnarled, twisted trunks, to the beautiful masses of thickets which announce the end of a high forest and which will die on the shore’ (op. cit., p. 5; ‘à la majesté, à la grandeur des feuillages, à l’irrégulière beauté des troncs noueux, tordus, aux belles masses de taillis qui annoncent la fin d’une haute forêt et qui vont mourir sur le rivage’). The landscape was similarly referenced by both Alfred von Wurzbach and Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, the latter of whom perhaps understated the case by describing it simply as an ‘important painting’ in Both’s oeuvre (op. cit.; ‘Bedeutendes Bild’).
In a sun-filled Italian landscape, two groups of trees rise the full height of the canvas at center and right as a dirt path recedes diagonally from the painting’s left foreground. The path passes behind the central grouping before zigzagging back as it hugs the shoreline of a lake that in the nineteenth century was traditionally identified as Lake Bolsena in central Italy. A group of eight figures adds a touch of local color as they make their way in the painting’s foreground, while a herder guides his cow in the distance. A rocky escarpment and several low-lying mountains rise in the distance, before which a solitary structure sits along the water’s edge. Though painted in Holland, the verisimilitude of the landscape confirms Both’s intimate familiarity with Italy, which he encountered firsthand during a sojourn south of the Alps between circa 1638 and 1642.
Many early commentators, including the anonymous author in The Sporting Magazine, Smith, Blanc and von Wurzbach, described the painting as a collaboration between Jan and his elder brother, Andries, who they suggested provided the figures. However, modern scholarship has put the lie to this train of thought, as the picture almost assuredly post-dates Andries’s death in 1642. In his entry on the painting for the seminal Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, Peter C. Sutton convincingly argued for a dating of circa 1650 (op. cit.).
While precisely dating Both’s paintings is difficult owing to the paucity of securely dated works – only one painting, the Landscape with Mercury and Argus of 1650 in the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen, Alte Pinakothek, Munich is dated (inv. no. 140) – comparison with the painting in Munich as well as paintings like the Scene of the Roman Campagna in the Indianapolis Museum of Art (inv. no. 55.225), which has traditionally been dated to circa 1647, all but confirm the suggestion that this example dates to circa 1650. The painting’s size, its deep green palette and the lush, large-scale foliage are all hallmarks of Both’s approach to painting in the final years of his life. Moreover, in his 1976 dissertation on the artist, James D. Burke described the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston painting as ‘a large-size remake of the painting in Indianapolis…with intensified color, wider tonal effects, more heroic scale, refined composition and without obvious repoussoirs’ (op. cit.). The Indianapolis painting, therefore, provides a terminus post quem for ours.
In addition to Browne’s engraving, two painted copies, one in a private collection in Cornwall and another in the collection of N.G. Harmer, Hastings, Sussex, are known (see J.D. Burke, op. cit., under no. 12).
A NOTE ON THE PROVENANCE
Rarely is a picture so well-documented as this ambitious landscape. The painting caused something of a sensation when it was offered by the Clifford family in Amsterdam on 10 November 1762. A letter dated 18 October from the Boston-born artist, agent and dealer, John Greenwood (1727-1792), to Sir Lawrence Dundas, on whose behalf Greenwood would ultimately acquire the painting with the assistance of the Amsterdam-based dealer Pierre Fouquet, Jr. (1729-1800), emphatically conveys the contemporary esteem for it:
Sir, I make bold to send you inclosed a Catalogue of Pictures which will be sold here ye 10th of ye ensuing mo – if any thing therein should please you, you’ll be kind enô to let me know it in time – those pieces marked thus + + are excellent – and thus + very good with y 0 – good pictures but not so extradionary [sic] – The No. 17 – a Landscape by Jan Both (iii) is a Masterpiece in its kind – and if you have now a mind of forming yr Cabinet I can collect 10 or 12 good pictures from this Sale – those 2 pictures I mention’d in my last I have pact’t and sent to Mr. Craufurd on whom I have drawn for ye amount £375 holl. Which hope will not be displeasing to you – as I am fully persuaded they are real good pieces and well worth ye money.
I am Sir with Respect
ymost Obt. Ser.
Jno. Greenwood
Dundas subsequently delivered instructions for Greenwood to participate in the sale and, on December 10, Greenwood sent his client a long letter which included an invoice amounting to f 4,506, which included his five percent commission and shipping costs. In addition to the Both, which, at f 944, cost nearly twice as much as the next most valuable painting – a ‘Galant’ for f 500 by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout – Dundas acquired precisely the types of works that were fashionable in England in the middle of the eighteenth century. These included two paintings by Philips Wouwerman and Jan(?) Griffier as well as one each by Jan van Huysum, Aelbert Cuyp and Ludolf Bakhuizen.
Dundas financed his collection by the enormous fortune he had amassed as a merchant and contractor, in part by becoming Commissary-General of the Army in Scotland, Flanders and Germany during the Seven Years War and also through successful speculation on the Stock Exchange. Though described by James Boswell in 1780 as ‘a comely, jovial Scottish gentleman of good address but not bright parts,’ Dundas proved his discernment in the arts by assembling an extraordinary collection of pictures, notably those of the Dutch and Flemish schools, as evidenced by the portrait he commissioned of himself and his grandson, the future Earl of Zetland, from Johan Zoffany in 1769⁄70 (fig. 3). The fashionable interior of the townhouse at 19 Arlington Street in London, which was renovated by Robert Adam and furnished by London’s finest cabinetmaker, Thomas Chippendale, depicted in Zoffany’s double portrait is adorned with no fewer than fourteen paintings. At center above the fireplace is Jan van de Cappelle’s Shipping Becalmed (Cardiff, National Museum of Wales), which Dundas acquired from Greenwood shortly after purchasing the Both. The painting’s grand carved and gilt frame is precisely the profile that is retained on our painting. The frame's design has traditionally been attributed to the neoclassical architect, interior designer and furniture designer Robert Adam, while the carving is by the preeminent London carver Sefferin Alken, whose projects included work for Houghton (1764, 1769 and 1771), Somerset House (1777-83), Blenheim Palace (1778) and Woburn Abbey. The van de Cappelle is in turn flanked by three paintings by Cuyp, two marines by Jan van de Velde, a landscape by Adam Pynacker and, at the bottom, two long paintings formerly believed to be by Veronese that are now known to be Netherlandish copies. On the opposite wall are two paintings by David Teniers II.
Dundas’s son and heir, Thomas, must have placed great value on the present painting, for it was one of only four lots he reacquired for the family at the 1794 sale. These included a portrait of Ann Boleyn given to Hans Holbein the Younger; a painting by Philips Wouwerman, known today exclusively through a copy (Adelaide, Art Gallery of South Australia) and Nicolas Poussin’s Crucifixion (Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art), the last of which achieved the same exceptional price as our landscape. These two works were understandably among the most expensive in the sale, exceeded only by three lots: Nature and her followers by Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder (Glasgow, Kelvingrove Art Gallery), a Village festival by David Teniers the Younger and Rembrandt’s magisterial Portrait of Cornelis Claesz. Anslo and his wife, Aaltje Schouten (fig. 4; Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin).