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Lot Essay
Lavished with the care and detail for which he was so celebrated, this verdant villagescape by Lucas van Valckenborch is a remarkable example of both his technical mastery and his gift for storytelling. Peppered with what Karel van Mander called storykens (‘little stories’) in his influential Schilder-Boeck of 1604, Valckenborch uses the landscape to connect vignettes that enliven and animate the scenery.
Along with his elder brother, Marten, Lucas van Valckenborch belonged to the first generation of an artistic family that would come to number at least fourteen painters. Born in Leuven, Lucas joined the Mechelen painters guild in 1560, established a studio there by 1564, moved to Liège in 1566 and subsequently followed his brother to Aachen. It has traditionally been assumed that Valckenborch took up residence in Antwerp by 1574 or 1575, and this painting, which is dated 1574 and depicts the city’s skyline in the background, provides striking evidence for his move in or before this year. It was in Antwerp that, in 1579, he was named court painter to the Habsburg Archduke Matthias (1557-1619), governor of the Spanish Netherlands. In or after 1582, he accompanied the Archduke to Linz, ultimately reuniting with his family in Frankfurt around 1592/3, where he appears to have directed a large workshop.
Valckenborch’s paintings suggest the prevailing influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was around ten years his senior, and whose work the younger artist no doubt encountered while working in Mechelen, where Bruegel was active in the early years of the 1550s. In his journey-of-life imagery, Valckenborch drew on the same Flemish tradition, inspired by many of Bruegel’s visual narratives, which he retold in his own distinctive idiom. Known as a gifted portraitist, he even produced miniaturised portraits in his landscapes, and it is perhaps his background in this genre that accounts for the expressive facial features and gestures of each miniscule figure in this picture. They leave no area uninhabited and convey a palpable sense of the chatter, laughter and clinking tankards that fills the scene.
The artist’s gift for narration allows his viewer to understand the full spectrum of human folly: we enter the composition from the bridge at the lower left, across which two men are restrained as they draw swords in anger; the drama drifts into a smaller dispute, before easing into merry groups of villagers as they drink and converse. In the far distance, the belfry of Antwerp’s Cathedral of Our Lady rises prominently above the horizon. Against this backdrop, a shepherd herds his sheep, so minute that they could just as easily be lifted from the margins of an illuminated manuscript; closer to the foreground is the familiar scene of a wedding feast, the composition of which was no doubt derived from Bruegel’s famed Peasant Wedding (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; fig. 1). A dancing group at centre right directs the beholder to one final incidental detail in the lower foreground – a fisherman startled by the ambush of a group of eels. Sat beneath an impressive tree, this detail echoes one found in Bruegel’s drawn Pond with angler in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I, Brussels.
Valckenborch often mixed topographically accurate settings drawn from nature with those he had gleaned from other artists. In addition to Bruegel’s influence, Valckenborch appears to have been aware of the so-called Errera Sketchbook, a bound volume of pen drawings of landscapes, trees, mountains and townscapes that had formerly been attributed to the artist himself (see Gudlaugsson, op. cit.). The motif of the farmhouse and dovecot that appears in this picture derives from one such drawing (fig. 2). The remarkable similarity between Valckenborch's paintings and the Errera drawings may well indicate that the artist himself possessed the sketchbook, demonstrating how such imagery could broadly permeate an artistic milieu. The same farmhouse features in at least three further paintings: a panel attributed to Herri met de Bles (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, inv. no. 4704), an anonymous version dated 1546 and the background of a painting depicting Christ Carrying the Cross, also ascribed to Herri met de Bles (both formerly in the collection of Marcus Kappel, Berlin).
Along with his elder brother, Marten, Lucas van Valckenborch belonged to the first generation of an artistic family that would come to number at least fourteen painters. Born in Leuven, Lucas joined the Mechelen painters guild in 1560, established a studio there by 1564, moved to Liège in 1566 and subsequently followed his brother to Aachen. It has traditionally been assumed that Valckenborch took up residence in Antwerp by 1574 or 1575, and this painting, which is dated 1574 and depicts the city’s skyline in the background, provides striking evidence for his move in or before this year. It was in Antwerp that, in 1579, he was named court painter to the Habsburg Archduke Matthias (1557-1619), governor of the Spanish Netherlands. In or after 1582, he accompanied the Archduke to Linz, ultimately reuniting with his family in Frankfurt around 1592/3, where he appears to have directed a large workshop.
Valckenborch’s paintings suggest the prevailing influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, who was around ten years his senior, and whose work the younger artist no doubt encountered while working in Mechelen, where Bruegel was active in the early years of the 1550s. In his journey-of-life imagery, Valckenborch drew on the same Flemish tradition, inspired by many of Bruegel’s visual narratives, which he retold in his own distinctive idiom. Known as a gifted portraitist, he even produced miniaturised portraits in his landscapes, and it is perhaps his background in this genre that accounts for the expressive facial features and gestures of each miniscule figure in this picture. They leave no area uninhabited and convey a palpable sense of the chatter, laughter and clinking tankards that fills the scene.
The artist’s gift for narration allows his viewer to understand the full spectrum of human folly: we enter the composition from the bridge at the lower left, across which two men are restrained as they draw swords in anger; the drama drifts into a smaller dispute, before easing into merry groups of villagers as they drink and converse. In the far distance, the belfry of Antwerp’s Cathedral of Our Lady rises prominently above the horizon. Against this backdrop, a shepherd herds his sheep, so minute that they could just as easily be lifted from the margins of an illuminated manuscript; closer to the foreground is the familiar scene of a wedding feast, the composition of which was no doubt derived from Bruegel’s famed Peasant Wedding (Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; fig. 1). A dancing group at centre right directs the beholder to one final incidental detail in the lower foreground – a fisherman startled by the ambush of a group of eels. Sat beneath an impressive tree, this detail echoes one found in Bruegel’s drawn Pond with angler in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I, Brussels.
Valckenborch often mixed topographically accurate settings drawn from nature with those he had gleaned from other artists. In addition to Bruegel’s influence, Valckenborch appears to have been aware of the so-called Errera Sketchbook, a bound volume of pen drawings of landscapes, trees, mountains and townscapes that had formerly been attributed to the artist himself (see Gudlaugsson, op. cit.). The motif of the farmhouse and dovecot that appears in this picture derives from one such drawing (fig. 2). The remarkable similarity between Valckenborch's paintings and the Errera drawings may well indicate that the artist himself possessed the sketchbook, demonstrating how such imagery could broadly permeate an artistic milieu. The same farmhouse features in at least three further paintings: a panel attributed to Herri met de Bles (Brussels, Royal Museums of Fine Arts, inv. no. 4704), an anonymous version dated 1546 and the background of a painting depicting Christ Carrying the Cross, also ascribed to Herri met de Bles (both formerly in the collection of Marcus Kappel, Berlin).