Description
A winter landscape with skaters and kolf players on a frozen waterway by a village signed and dated 'JV Cappelle. A. 1653' (lower left) oil on panel 15 3/8 x 241/2 in. (39.1 x 62.2 cm.) PROVENANCE Acquired by the uncle of the present owner in Rome in circa 1935, and by inheritance to the present owner. NOTES Jan van de Cappelle's fame as one of the outstanding Dutch painters of the seventeenth century is largely based on his seascapes. These greatly outnumber his winter scenes of which only a small group of around twenty pictures are thought to survive; indeed, Margarita Russell ( Jan van de Cappelle, London, 1975, p. 30) notes that fewer than fifty winter landscapes were ever known, but stresses that few of those listed by Hofstede de Groot (his nos. 143-180) can still be accounted for. Peter Sutton gives the number at fewer than two dozen, of which only about six bear dates, restricted to either 1652 or 1653 (P. Sutton, in the catalogue of the exhibition, Masters of 17th Century Dutch Landscape Painting, Amsterdam, Boston and Philadelphia, 2 October 1987-31 July 1988, p. 287). This would indicate a short but intensive period of activity in this area. Hofstede de Groot recorded a 'very good' winter scene dated 1644 but he had not seen it and it remains untraced. Given the scarcity of winter scenes by the artist, the re-emergence of this hitherto unknown panel of 1653 can be regarded as a significant discovery. It is one of only a handful to be painted on panel and, of those, the only one to be dated. Virtually all of his key winter landscapes, including the three other known pictures of 1653 (in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, the Frits Lugt collection at the Institut N‚erlandais, Paris, and the picture formerly in the Heinemann collection, sold after the sale at Christie's, London, 4 July 1997, lot 16) are on canvas. The choice of support goes some way to explaining the apparent disparity between the silvery-blue tonality of the canvas pictures and the more monochrome brownish tones of the present work, expressed through a restrained palette composed almost entirely of black, brown and white. In structure and overall character, however, the present composition corresponds closely not only with the other views of 1653, but with virtually all of the known winter landscapes. The closest comparable is probably the undated panel in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid; both pictures share the same brown monochromatic tonality and feature an identical drawbridge in the central background. Margarita Russell notes that the Thyssen picture 'unlike the other winter scenes with their predominantly grey and silver hues, has a distinctly brown-yellow tonality'. For all Van de Cappelle's fame today, it is a remarkable aspect of his career that he was not a professional artist. Self-trained - a fact affirmed by his friend Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, who described him in 1654 in the Album Amicorum Jacobus Heyblocq (now in the Royal Library in the Hague) as 'bij hem selfs uijt eygen lust geleert' ['who taught himself to paint out of his own desire'] - and the son of an affluent Amsterdam businessman, he married the wealthy Anna Grotingh, lived on the Keizersgracht and had his portrait painted by Rembrandt and Frans Hals (both untraced). His last will shows that, in addition to an immense fortune, Van de Cappelle owned extensive properties and an art collection that was one of the most important of his day. The inventory of the collection dated 1680, lists 200 paintings, including seven Rembrandts and three works by Rubens, as well as more than 7,000 drawings including 900 by Avercamp, 400 by Van Goyen, 1300 by de Vlieger and 500 by Rembrandt, most of which were acquired at the artist's insolvency sale in 1658, including nearly 300 (almost all) of Rembrandt's landscape sketches. Van de Cappelle's personal fortune afforded him considerable artistic freedom. He was under no pressure to establish an artistic reputation and never had to rely on painting for a living. The fact that his father ran the family business until his death in 1674, only five years before his own, allowed Van de Cappelle plenty of time to pursue his hobby of painting. It is hard to assess what effect this had on his output. Certainly, his winter scenes do not suggest any particular effort to appeal to a potential market. Rather than expound the pleasures of the northern winter in the traditional way, the bleak tone evoked in Van de Cappelle's scenes often present winter as something to be endured rather than enjoyed. In this work, the peasants that occupy the landscape appear sombre, hunched up by the cold with hands in pockets while their boats, which would have provided the lifeblood for a village such as this, are icebound. The popular winter game of kolf is played disconsolately by a solitary figure in the central foreground. As in his marine painting, Van de Cappelle's principal concern is the rendition of light and atmosphere. The stillness and calm for which his seascapes are so admired is reflected by the wintry quiet that he manages to convey in the present work. He captures the very essence of a chilled winter morning - the silvery sky, the ice-encrusted trees, the reflected surface of the ice, as well as the bitterly cold figures who inhabit the landscape. Van de Cappelle's winter landscapes share many affinites with those of Aert van der Neer, his elder by some twenty years. Although he seems never to have owned any of his paintings, he was probably influenced by him and, as Russell has observed, the elder artist's late works were in turn no doubt influenced by the younger's pictures of 1652 and 1653. What is undeniable is that Van de Cappelle's output in those two years all but eclipsed Van der Neer's. As Stechow has argued 'the latter's contributions to this realm all but overshadow the older master's work...., not so much in effects of luminosity as in subtlety and harmoniousness of composition and colour combination, and most conspicuously in his capacity for reticence and poetical understatement' ( Dutch Landscape Painting of the Seventeenth Century, London, 1996, p. 95). We are grateful to Dr. Margarita Russell for confirming the attribution after examining the picture in the original.
