Lot 72: Jan van de Cappelle Amsterdam 1626-1679

Jan van de Cappelle Amsterdam 1626-1679
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 24 3/8 in. 39.2 x 61.9 cm.

Acquired by a private collector (Anfuso) in Rome circa 1935; thence by descent to his nephew; Christie's, London, 12 December 2001, lot 44 (£861,750).

From time to time, Christie's may offer a lot which it owns in whole or in part. This is such a lot.
Jan van de Cappelle was both an artist of genius and a rich man; he painted for his own pleasure and his oeuvre numbers only about 150 works, chiefly marines. Fewer than twenty winter scenes by him are known, which all seem to have been executed between 1652 and 1654.

Van de Cappelle borrowed motifs from the winter scenes of Hendrick Avercamp and fellow Amsterdammer Aert van der Neer, twenty-three years his senior, who was sliding towards bankruptcy on the Kalverstraat while van de Cappelle held court on the fashionable Keizersgracht. This painting shows his exquisite feeling for the rendition of light and atmosphere, a preoccupation which also dominates his marine works. The scene is unified through a palette composed almost entirely of black, brown and white, linking the scuffed expanse of ice with a sky full of shifting, vaporous clouds. Van de Cappelle's subtle and deep composition is achieved through a mastery of scientific perspective in which the placing of figures and bare-branched trees leads the eye far into the landscape. His austere yet poetic picture captures the eerie chill and calm of a winter's day, with a boat half-coffined in ice, villagers trudging with their hands in their pockets and a man playing a solitary game of kolf.

Only a handful of van de Cappelle's winter landscapes are painted on panel and this is the only one to be dated. Three other winter scenes dated 1653 are known, all on canvas: the paintings in the Mauritshuis, The Hague; the Frits Lugt Collection at the Institut Néerlandais, Paris; and the work formerly in the Heinemann Collection, now in a distinguished private collection, The difference in support probably accounts for the silvery-blue tonality of the canvas pictures, though they correspond closely to the present work in structure and spirit. The closest comparable work to the present painting is the undated panel in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, which shares its soft brown monochromatic tonality and features an identical drawbridge in the center background.