Lot 216: *JACOB PYNAS (CIRCA 1585-CIRCA 1656)

oil on copper Jacob and his elder brother Jan Pynas travelled to Rome in circa 1605 with Pieter Lastman, where they stayed for three years. All three were influenced by Adam Elsheimer, and the Pynas brothers, in particular, by the Venetian painter Carlo Saraceni, who had himself fallen under the Elsheimer spell a year or two earlier. Jan Pynas' precocious Raising of Lazarus of 1605 (Ascaffenburg, Staatsgalerie), with its theatrical crepuscular lighting, shows how quickly the brothers were able to translate their Roman experience into pictorial experiments. Saraceni's style later developed in a different direction and so, eventually, did that of Jan Pynas, but his brother Jacob continued to paint small pictures on copper, such as the present work, that remain remarkably similar to those of Saraceni, until well into the 1630s. Similar small figures, painted with a loaded brush derived directly from Elsheimer, Italianate architecture, and a somewhat ethereal lighting that could be strong moonlight or muted sunlight, are to be found in other such small pictures on copper by Jacob Pynas, including both treatments of his Moses Meeting Aaron on Mount Horeb, in Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister (inv. GK 612 & GK 1108), datable to the 1620s, and both, like the present work, unsigned, a painting of Hagar in the Wilderness, using the same landscape setting as the Kassel pictures, dated 1620 or 1626 (Private collection, Paris), and another treatment of the present subject, signed and dated 1631, in Dresden, Gemäldegalerie (inv. 1547 A). Since the larger figures of the latter picture are closer in style to contemporary works of other Pre-Rembrandtists, and are more Dutch and less Elsheimeresque, the present painting probably dates, like the Kassel and Paris coppers, from the preceding decade.

Curtis O. Baer, New Rochelle, New York With Robert Noortman, Maastricht, from whom bought by the present owner