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Lot Essay
Jan Siberechts was a leading painter of bucolic landscapes, first in his native Antwerp, where he became a member of the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke in 1648⁄9, and later in England, where he resided from about 1672⁄4. As with many seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish artists, Siberechts was greatly inspired by the Roman campagna and suffused his early landscapes with Italianate light. While it is uncertain whether the artist travelled to Italy himself, he no doubt encountered the work of contemporaries like Nicolaes Berchem, Karel Dujardin and Jan Both and absorbed their observations on light and atmosphere. Between 1661 and 1672, Siberechts developed a distinctive style of Flemish landscape painting that focuses on the idylls of country life, of which the present painting is a particularly striking example.
Siberechts here presents a charming depiction of rustic Flemish life using, as is typical of his paintings of the period, a symmetrical triangular composition anchored by the castle at left, the woman wading through the water viewed from behind in the painting’s foreground and the windmill in the right background. The simple red clothing of both the standing female figure and the woman in the cart bringing vegetables to market are set off from the cool green tonality of the verdant landscape. As he so often does in works like this, Siberechts revelled in painted details like the prominent patch along the lower edge of the standing woman’s jacket, the still-life elements at the back of the cart and the play of light as the horse splashes through an otherwise placid stream.
Though the final two digits of the date are currently illegible, the painting probably dates to the second half of the 1660s or early 1670s. It was in this period that Siberechts’s distinctive approach reached its apogee. Figures are placed more prominently in the foreground to create a sense of volume and space and trees and branches like the sinuous trunk in the central middle ground stand out as distinctive features deployed to enhance the painting’s decorative appeal.
Siberechts here presents a charming depiction of rustic Flemish life using, as is typical of his paintings of the period, a symmetrical triangular composition anchored by the castle at left, the woman wading through the water viewed from behind in the painting’s foreground and the windmill in the right background. The simple red clothing of both the standing female figure and the woman in the cart bringing vegetables to market are set off from the cool green tonality of the verdant landscape. As he so often does in works like this, Siberechts revelled in painted details like the prominent patch along the lower edge of the standing woman’s jacket, the still-life elements at the back of the cart and the play of light as the horse splashes through an otherwise placid stream.
Though the final two digits of the date are currently illegible, the painting probably dates to the second half of the 1660s or early 1670s. It was in this period that Siberechts’s distinctive approach reached its apogee. Figures are placed more prominently in the foreground to create a sense of volume and space and trees and branches like the sinuous trunk in the central middle ground stand out as distinctive features deployed to enhance the painting’s decorative appeal.