GERRIT ADRIAENSZ. BERCKHEYDE (HAARLEM 1638-1698)
GERRIT ADRIAENSZ. BERCKHEYDE (HAARLEM 1638-1698)
GERRIT ADRIAENSZ. BERCKHEYDE (HAARLEM 1638-1698)
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This lot is offered without reserve.
GERRIT ADRIAENSZ. BERCKHEYDE (HAARLEM 1638-1698)

Gentlemen watering their horses and washerwomen at a fountain, a peasant playing with a dog, travelers and the Church of St. Pantaleon, Cologne, beyond

Details
GERRIT ADRIAENSZ. BERCKHEYDE (HAARLEM 1638-1698)
Gentlemen watering their horses and washerwomen at a fountain, a peasant playing with a dog, travelers and the Church of St. Pantaleon, Cologne, beyond
oil on canvas
20 3/4 x 25 1/2 in. (52.7 x 64.8 cm.)
Provenance
[The Property of a Gentleman]; Christie’s, London, 10 December 1993, lot 6, where acquired by the present owner.
Special notice
This lot is offered without reserve.

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Lot Essay


With Jan van der Heyden, Gerrit Berckheyde pioneered the townscape as an independent genre of painting in the third quarter of the seventeenth century and is today regarded as one of its leading exponents. Though the majority of Berckheyde’s townscapes depict the streets, squares and canals of local cities like Haarlem, Amsterdam and The Hague, he equally turned his brush to more distant places, including the German cities of Bonn, Heidelberg and Cologne. In the second half of the 1650s, Gerrit visited these and other German cities while traveling along the Rhine with his elder brother, Job, reputedly in the employ of Karl Ludwig, the Elector Palatine in Heidelberg.

Though rustic views of the Rhineland may be among Berckheyde’s earliest works (see, for example, the painting formerly in the collection of Prof. Singer in Prague, dated 1661 and said to be a scene outside the town of Kleve; see C. Lawrence, Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde (1638-1698): Haarlem Cityscape Painter, Doornspijk, 1991, p. 77), he seems to have begun painting German townscapes only in the early 1670s. As with the townscapes by his contemporary van der Heyden, Berckheyde’s views are often capriccios, the various architectural elements deriving from drawings that Berckheyde no doubt made while traveling through the Rhineland and years later assembled into visually appealing, if not entirely topographically accurate, compositions. Berckheyde’s method of employing drawings produced more than a decade earlier when developing his paintings is not dissimilar from that of his great Haarlem predecessor, the architectural painter Pieter Saenredam (see, for example, Saenredam’s Crossing and nave of the St Odulphuskerk, Assendelft, from the choir dated 2 October 1649 in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, which is based on a sketch made in situ and dated 31 July 1634 in the Amsterdam Museum as well as a subsequent compositional drawing dated 9 December 1643 in Zeist). The view of St. Pantaleon in the present painting may derive from one such drawing, for it appears from the same orientation in a painting dated 1672 in the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum, Hanover (see Lawrence, op. cit., p. 81, pl. 90).

That most of Berckheyde’s German townscapes are composite views bringing together fictive juxtapositions of monuments, combined with the sheer number of such works within Berckheyde’s oeuvre, has engendered speculation about the types of people who originally acquired them. One suggestion holds that these paintings may have been intended as souvenirs for Dutch tourists who had traveled in Germany. Another proposes that because Berckheyde’s German views only began to appear in the 1670s, a period that coincides with his increased production of views of Amsterdam, they may have been painted for customers in that city, and perhaps specifically for the city’s large and well-established German community (for a fuller discussion of both theories, see Lawrence, op. cit., p. 78).

The Church of St. Pantaleon is one of twelve Romanesque churches in Cologne and occupies a hill on which a Roman villa once stood. A church replaced the villa around 870, and Archbishop Bruno the Great, brother of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto the Great, added a Benedictine abbey in 955. The current church was begun in 966 and consecrated in 980, and is the burial place of Holy Roman Empress Theophanu, wife of Otto II, who ordered construction of the church’s façade in 972.

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