JAN SIBERECHTS (ANTWERP 1627-1703 LONDON)
JAN SIBERECHTS (ANTWERP 1627-1703 LONDON)
JAN SIBERECHTS (ANTWERP 1627-1703 LONDON)
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This lot is offered without reserve.
JAN SIBERECHTS (ANTWERP 1627-1703 LONDON)

A pastoral landscape with a shepherdess on a donkey carrying a basket of flowers fording a stream, another rider with sheep and cattle and a village beyond

Details
JAN SIBERECHTS (ANTWERP 1627-1703 LONDON)
A pastoral landscape with a shepherdess on a donkey carrying a basket of flowers fording a stream, another rider with sheep and cattle and a village beyond
signed and dated ‘J. Siberechts. / 1683’ (lower right, on the rock)
oil on canvas
55 x 49 1/2 in. (139.7 x 126 cm.)
Provenance
J. Jefferson, London.
Anonymous sale; Christie’s, London, 8 July 1929, lot 72.
with Asscher and Welcher, London.
with Paul Larsen, London, by 1931.
Samuel Hartveld; (†), Parke-Bernet, New York, 15 November 1950, lot 80.
[The Property of a Private Collector]; Christie’s, New York, 11 January 1989, lot 129, where acquired by the present owner.
Literature
T.H. Fokker, Jan Siberechts: peintre de la paysanne flamande, Brussels and Paris, 1931, pp. 52, 74 and 98, pl. 38.
J. Harris, The Artist and the Country House: A History of Country House and Garden View Painting in Britain, 1540-1870, London and Totowa, NJ, 1979, p. 47.
Special notice
This lot is offered without reserve.

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Lot Essay


The Antwerp-born artist Jan Siberechts was a leading painter of bucolic landscapes in his native city for nearly a quarter century before relocating to London in the summer of 1672. Siberechts’ move across the Channel was apparently at the invitation of George Villiers, 2nd Duke of Buckingham, whom he had met in Antwerp in 1670. While Siberechts’ patrons in Antwerp were largely drawn from the wealthy bourgeoisie and merchant classes, Buckingham was emblematic of the nobility and landed gentry who favored the artist in England. In England, Siberechts’ name increasingly became synonymous with the country house portrait, an early example of which is his 1675 depiction of Longleat for Sir Thomas Thynne (private collection), though he also continued to paint pure landscapes of a type favored in Antwerp. Much like his country house portraits and unlike many of his earlier landscapes painted in Antwerp, these works almost always contained topographical elements.

Siberechts’ English landscapes follow much the same formula as his earlier paintings, centering around prominent trees bathed in soft light with a background receding to distant hills. Figures tend to be subordinated to the landscape, and the viewer’s eye is drawn from the relatively dark foreground to the brightly lit vista in the background. Timon Henricus Fokker, who included this painting among Siberechts’ autograph works (loc. cit.), speculated on the possibility of studio assistance. More recently, however, John Harris described the painting as ‘the really characteristic Siberechtian piece’ of the artist’s English period (loc. cit.). On the basis of a transparency at the time of the 1989 sale, he confirmed that he did not believe any studio hands were involved in the painting’s production. He further suggested that the village in the background was less likely to be Edensor in Derbyshire than a village in the Thames Valley, since Siberechts never worked so far north.

A smaller variant of this composition, signed and dated 1684 and in a horizontal rather than upright format, was sold Christie’s, Amsterdam, 10 November 1997, lot 124.

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