Lot 56: HENDRIK VOOGD AMSTERDAM 1768 - 1839 ROME

A VIEW OF THE ROMAN CAMPAGNA WITH FIGURES AND CATTLE CROSSING A FORD

measurements note
98 by 139 cm.; 38 1/2 by 54 3/4 in.

signed and dated lower right: H. Voogd 1814

oil on canvas, unlined, in a (probably original) gilt wood frame

LITERATURE

C. Stefani, in History, Portrait, Landscape Neoclassical and Romantica Painters in Italy, exhibition catalogue, Rome, 20 May - 20 June 2004, pp. 22-3, cat. no. 16, reproduced in colour plate XXII.

NOTE

Although born and raised in Amsterdam, Hendrik Voogd never returned to the North after his arrival in Rome on 3rd July 1788 (despite an invitation in 1808 to come back to the Netherlands and run an art academy). He became a member of the Accademia di San Luca in 1816, by which time he was known as a gifted landscape painter. His popularity with Dutch connoisseurs such as Dirk Versteegh, Adriaan van der Willigen and Willem H.J. van Westreenen continued to grow throughout the end of the 18th and early 19th Centuries but, perhaps because there were relatively few Dutch artists in Rome at the end of the 18th Century, Voogd was more closely associated with the German artistic community. His work was, like Jakob Philipp Hackert's, particularly popular with German Grand Tourists, among whom he came to be known, from as early as 1800, as "The Dutch Claude Lorrain". Indeed he produced a series of etchings in 1803 in which he copied paintings by Claude in the Doria Pamphilij collection in Rome, in one case making modifications to Claude's original. Voogd also had recourse to 17th-century Dutch artists, most obviously to Paulus Potter whose paintings of cattle lent these animals a great nobility. Of some sixty recorded paintings by Voogd only a third are known today.

Perhaps inspired by the taste in the Romantic, Voogd displays in this work his interest in painting the Roman campagna not as an idealised arcadian landscape but in wild weather conditions: compare his signed painting sold in these rooms, 9 July 1998, lot 2, or the painting in the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague (both reproduced in C.J. de Bruyn Kops, "Hendrik Voogd, Nederlands Landschapschilder te Rome (1768-1839)", in Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, vol. 21, 1970, pp. 351-2, figs. 26 and 27 respectively). The motif of figures crossing a ford is one that he repeated five years later, in a signed and dated painting of 1819 in Montpellier, Musée Fabre (M. Hilaire, in Tableaux flamands et hollandais du Musée Fabre de Montpellier, Paris 1998, pp. 233-5, reproduced in colour); the chief difference being that the figures are here shown walking under an impending storm.