Lot Essay
Celebrated for his paintings of landscapes drenched in golden light, Jan Both was a highly influential figure among the second generation of Dutch landscape painters who visited Italy. His early biographer, Joachim von Sandrart, mentioned that he studied with Abraham Bloemaert and Gerrit van Honthorst before undertaking a trip to Italy around 1638, where joined his brother, Andries, and became a member of the community of Northern painters known as the Bentvueghels, or ‘birds of a feather’. While in Rome, he befriended Claude Lorrain, with whom he collaborated on two series of large landscapes commissioned for the Buen Retiro Palace in Madrid (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). Following the death of his brother, who fell into a Venetian canal, Jan returned to Utrecht in the early 1640s and by 1649 was presiding over the city’s Guild of Saint Luke.
While Jan specialized in genre paintings in Italy, in his maturity in Utrecht he produced idealized landscapes like the present work that evoked the continued influence of his Mediterranean sojourn. This painting can be dated to circa 1645-50 and is comparable to a version of the same subject in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (inv. no. 1071; see J.D. Burke, Jan Both: Paintings, Drawings and Prints, New York and London 1976, pp. 245-246, no. 108, where he dates the Stockholm picture to circa 1645-50, and was also apparently unaware of the present work). While the distant castle in the center of this painting is absent from the Stockholm version, there is also less emphasis on the foreground figures, with a more dramatic use of contrasting light and shadow in the landscape. Both paintings reveal his knowledge of Italian models. The foreground figure of a man carrying a woman on his back may be a quotation of Raphael's depiction of Aeneas carrying his father Anchises from the burning city of Troy in his The Fire in the Borgo (Stanza dell'Incendio, Rome), albeit in reverse. While the artist could have seen this firsthand in Rome, he more likely referred to contemporary engravings as a source for the model.
Such Italianate landscapes produced by Both and his peers Jan Asselijn and Nicolaes Berchem stood in striking contrast to the local Dutch views popularized in the period by artists like Jan van Goyen and Jacob van Ruisdael. They catered to pastoral ideals that enjoyed a renewed popularity in the period, particularly in Both’s native Utrecht, where the landed gentry retained more influence than elsewhere in the fledgling Dutch Republic.