Jan van Kessel (1641-1680)

Details

Jan van Kessel (1641-1680)

A Village in Winter with Peasants and a Kolf Player on a frozen Waterway

with signature 'm.hobbema.'
19 3/8 x 27 1/8in. (49.3 x 69cm.)

Provenance

(Possibly) John Stuart, 3rd Earl of Bute (1713-1792).
John Stuart, 2nd Marquess of Bute, Wroxton Abbey, Oxfordshire, by 1835.
His wife's half-sister, Susan, 10th Baroness North, by 1857.
Her son, William, 11th Baron North, 16 Arlington Street, London, and Wroxton Abbey; Christie's, 13 July 1895, lot 62, illustrated, as Hobbema; sold for 1,450gns. to Wooton on behalf of John Patrick Crichton-Stuart, 3rd Marquess of Bute, and by descent.

Literature

J. Smith, A Catalogue Raisonné, etc., VI, London, 1835, p. 151, no. 104, as Hobbema
C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné, etc., IV, London, 1912, p. 444, no. 288, as Hobbema
C. Hofstede de Groot, Meindert Hobbema, in U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler, XVII, Leipzig, 1924, p. 161, as Hobbema
G. Broulhiet, Meindert Hobbema, Paris, 1938, p. 398, no. 164, illustrated p. 184, as Hobbema
W. Stechow, Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century, London, 1966, p. 205, note 63, as Hobbema
M. Russell, A winter landscape after Jan van de Cappelle, The Burlington Magazine, CXXX, no. 1025, Aug. 1988, pp. 606-7, fig. 33
S. Slive, The Manor Kostverloren: Vicissitudes of a Seventeenth-Century Dutch Landscape Motif, in The Age of Rembrandt - Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Painting, ed. R.E. Fleischer and S. Scott Munshower, Papers in Art History from the Pennsylvania State University, 3, 1988, p. 149, note 61
I. Gaskell, The Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection - Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Painting, London, 1989, p. 420, illustrated under no. 98
A.I. Davies, Jan van Kessel, Doornspijk, 1992, pp. 78-9 and 193, no. 116, pl. 116

Exhibited

London, British Institution, June 1857, no. 119, as Hobbema
Washington, National Gallery of Art, The Treasure Houses of Britain, 3 Nov. 1985-16 March 1986, p. 374, no. 307, illustrated in colour, as Hobbema

Lot Essay

The present picture was universally regarded as the work of Meindert Hobbema, indeed as Hobbema's only known winter landscape, until The Treasure Houses of Britain exhibition in Washington in 1985-86. Margarita Russell subsequently pointed out, loc. cit., that it is a free copy, with 'a particular character of its own', by 'an artist with a distinct personality', of a winter landscape by Jan van de Cappelle in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection (ibid., fig. 34; Davies, op. cit., fig. 62). Her identification of the painter as Jan van Kessel is enthusiastically endorsed by Alice Davies, whose recent monograph establishes van Kessel as 'a landscape painter of unexpected breadth and originality' (ibid., p. 12)

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