Lot 62: Lucas van Valckenborch (Löwen 1535-1597 Frankfurt)

An extensive landscape with the Rest on the Flight into Egypt
signed with initials and dated '1595 LVV' (lower left) and with a later inscription giving the name and dates of the artist on the reverse
tempera on paper mounted on panel
2 3/8 x 3 3/8 in. (6 x 8.5 cm.)

This jewel-like landscape is amongst the most beautiful of Lucas van Valckenborch's late works and is exceptional as the smallest work by the artist and, along with a tondo in the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, his only miniaturist treatment of the landscape theme. Painted in Frankfurt where the artist settled in 1582, his use of tempera reflects the popularity the technique started to enjoy amongst Flemish landscapists, Hans Bol in particular, in the last quarter of the century. This must partly have been due to the pervading influence of Pieter Brueghel the Elder who is known to have used the technique with great effect, for instance in his Blind Beggars, in the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples. Only four other tempera landscapes by Valckenborch appear to be known. These include the aforementioned picture in the Victoria and Albert Museum, which is dated 1576; a Landscape with a windmill, dated 1577, in the Musée Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, and the Landscape with plundering soldiers, also 1577, sold at Sotheby's, New York, 12 January 1995, lot 52, from the collection of the New York Historical Society (see A. Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, Freren, 1990, pp. 142-44). While these earlier works are akin in almost every respect, other than their technique, to the artist's works in oil, the present picture appears to have been directly inspired by mid-sixteenth-century Flemish manuscript painting. This notion is supported by Valckenborch's uncharacteristic inclusion of religious subject matter, this being his only depiction of the Rest on the Flight into Egypt and the only landscape by the artist to incorporate a New Testament subject of any kind. The minutely detailed rendering of the landscape and effortless sense of recession into the far distance on the right side can be compared to the illuminations of Simon Benning and his followers. Moreover, Valckenborch's soft tonal effect achieved using a palette made up largely of muted blues and greens, recalls the manuscript painting of the Master of Charles V and his circle with whose works Valckenborch may have been familiar.

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