Sale 6673, Lot 528 Hendrick Avercamp (1585-1634) A winter landscape with elegant company skating on a frozen waterway Oil on panel Estimate: £600,000-800,000	Dr Dreesmann's Old Master Pictures span the greatest age of Dutch painting. Nearly every aspect of Dutch painting in the Golden Age is represented in the Dreesmann Collection. In a century and country which saw remarkable and unprecedented contributions to every aspect of picture making, Dr Dreesmann made notable acquisitions in the field of landscape, seascape and still life. Furthermore in 'The Spanish Gypsy' by Nicolaes Maes, he possessed a work, long thought to be by Rembrandt himself, which indeed vividly brings to mind that genius's manner of handling the brush circa 1650. Finally, one of Dr Dreesmann's last purchases was the superb Winter landscape by Hendrick Avercamp; it became the second picture by the artist, whose art rarely appears on the market, to enter the collection. Avercamp was the first artist in the northern Netherlands (recognized as the United Provinces in his early maturity) to make a speciality of winter scenes. His starting point must have been Pieter Bruegel the Elder's Bird Trap of 1565 - a work ever popular, as repetitions were a staple product of his son Pieter's studio. The painting's title inadequately conveys the scene, which shows villagers disporting on a frozen river, seen from afar and from above. In the course of his career, Avercamp was to lower his viewpoint and increase the scale of the foreground figures. Thus this Winter landscape is to be considered a late work, probably executed circa 1625. The elegantly dressed skaters - young patricians from perhaps Kampen where Avercamp spent much of his life - and the peasants who observe them were part of Avercamp's stock in trade as an artist, as they recur in other paintings. Avercamp is known to have been a mute, and this may explain an idiosyncrasy of his work: the isolated character of the protagonists in his brightly colored scenes of winter sports. Jan van Goyen's early work of the 1620s has a certain kinship with Avercamp's, though it lacks his monumentality. In his maturity however, van Goyen developed a seemingly effortless but in fact artful description of the Dutch countryside, which has remained incredibly influential. A river landscape with lime kilns is a typical work, probably executed in the 1640s. The artist evidently worked with great rapidity: establishing the water and sky with broad sweeps of the brush, and picking out the rest with calligraphic subtlety. His compositional talent - if not genius - lies in conveying the sense of its being instinctive and 'natural', certainly relaxed and unforced. The subject of the landscape is unusual - two lime kilns set near two large timber barns on the banks of a river. Lime, an essential ingredient of mortar, is produced by burning limestone or chalk. Limestone deposits in the United Provinces are confined to the south-east; thus much of what was used in the densely populated province of Holland would have been imported, or shipped up north. Van Goyen, who was chiefly based in The Hague and died in 1656, left an unusually comprehensive record of the topography of his country. In contrast, Willem Claesz. Heda seems rarely to have ventured out of his Haarlem house. He had a ready clientele for his endless fascination with familiar household objects re-arranged in ever varying computations relying - as in his typical Breakfast still life of 1643 - on a basic core of props: a ham, a knife and a peeled lemon on plates, a roemer, a wine glass and a bread bun. In contrast to the flamboyant, richly colored still lifes of Flanders, Heda preferred a calm statuesqueness conveyed in an almost monochromatic color range. Just as the Dutch made exceptional contributions to landscape painting, so they dominated the art of seascape in the 17th century. Ludolf Bakhuizen was active as a painter in Amsterdam from the late 1650s. Following the departure of the two Willem van de Veldes to England in 1672, he became the leading Dutch marine painter. As Dr de Beer informed Dr Dreesmann, in the fine seascape he bought at Christie's New York in 1996, Bakhuizen shows a scene on the River IJ, with Amsterdam in the distance, at its confluence with the Volewjick. To the right is the Custom House. The main subject is a sailing ship, called a 'flute', flying the Dutch flag, its topsails backed up and its main and foresails clewed up, so that the vessel is being slowly pushed back to starboard. Bakhuizen's achievement was to reproduce a scene accurately and at the same time convey the excitement of shipping under canvas in a breeze. Like the van Goyen and the Bakhuizen, 'The Spanish Gypsy' by Nicolaes Maes also makes a return to Christie's, where it was acquired by Dr Dreesmann at the sale of Baron Hatvany's collection in 1988. Dr Dreesmann leads a long tradition of distinguished owners of this enigmatic work, which was long thought to be by Rembrandt and which reflects his style, circa 1650, when Maes was his pupil. Maes was particularly inventive in the early years of his career, and this work reflects his burgeoning talent as a student of physiognomy (he was to become a distinguished portraitist) and also the studied informality of his approach to composition. It seems indeed likely that he here intended a portrait group in which attention is focused on the child about to be taken for a ride on the billy goat. The child was clearly of some importance as he is accompanied by three attendants. Maes's early self-confidence, no doubt inspired and encouraged by his famous teacher, is displayed by the large scale he selected as appropriate to commemorate this scene of childhood. Gregory Martin is an International Director of the Old Master Picture department at Christie's London. Read the Old Master Drawings article "Draughtsmanship" by Noël Annesley. Back to top