Lot 5: Philips Koninck , Amsterdam 1619 - 1688 An extensive landscape with figures and sheep on a path through woodland to the left, and a distant view across a river to a broad plain to the right oil on oak panel

signed and dated lower left: P. koninck / ...676 oil on oak panel

measurements note 56.8 by 76.2 cm.; 22 3/8 by 28 3/8 in.

Anonymous sale, Paris, Drouot, (Tajan) 27 June 1989, lot 34.

THE PROPERTY OF TWO LADIES
This picture is unusual for the combination of its oak panel support and its late dating. By the 1670s good quality oak panels were scarce in The Netherlands, but in any event Koninck rarely used them for landscape painting after his earliest works. The composition, with rising ground in the foreground acting almost as a repoussoir would by the 1670s have been rather old-fashioned in Dutch landscape painting, but Koninck's purest panoramas, with no foreground, are relatively early works, and by the 1660s his landscapes are more conventional, with foreground details and trees and figures placed close to the viewer, often to one side of the composition. Few of his works are dated, but the picture of 1668 in Leerdam, Hofje van Aerden exemplifies this more conservative late style, and the undated landscapes in Frankfurt, Städel, and New York, Metropolitan Museum, which have been dated to the mid-1660s and mid-1670s respectively, exemplify Koninck's use in his later works of foreground trees on rising ground as repoussoir devices.υ1

The same characteristics can be found more abundantly in Koninck's late drawings, several of which are composed in a similar way, with an extensive panorama on one side, and rising, sometimes wooded ground in the foreground on the other. Good examples include the sheets in Chantilly, Musée Condé, London, British Museum (two), and Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, all of which are now generally dated to the 1670s.υ2

1. See W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt Schuler, Landau/Pfalz 1983, vol. III, pp. 1549, 1551, nos. 1066, 1065, 1073, reproduced pp. 1661, 1615, 1623.
2. See W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, New York 1982, vol. 6, pp. 3358-3364, nos. 1517υx to 1519aυx , reproduced. The Chantilly drawing, which is particularly close to the present lot, is reproduced in colour and discussed in greater detail in D. Mandrella, Arcadie du Nord. Dessins hollandais du Musée Condé à Chantilly, exhibition catalogue, Chantilly, 2001, p. 52, no. 22, reproduced.