Sketch of a Town by a Mountain Lake / recto: Arcadian Mountain Landscape with a Round Tower

Johannes Glauber (Utrecht 1646 - Schoonhoven c. 1726)

He was the son of Johan Rudolf Glauber (1604-1670) and Helena Cornelisdr (1615-1689). His father was of German origin, but he was baptized in Utrecht on 18 May 1646. Two of his younger siblings, Diana Glauber (1650-c. 1721) and Johann Gottlieb Glauber (1656-1703), became artists. Probably during the second half of the 1660s, Johannes studied for nine months with Nicolaes Berchem (1621/22-1683) in Amsterdam. After his apprenticeship, he copied Italian paintings for the Amsterdam art dealer Gerrit Uylenburgh (c. 1625-1679). His ‘wanderjahre’ led him first to Paris, accompanied by his brother Johann Gottlieb. There, in 1671, he worked for the Flemish art dealer and flower painter Jean-Michel Picart (c. 1600-1682). In 1672-73, he is recorded in Lyon, where he worked for Adriaen van der Kabel (c. 1630/31-1705). He arrived in Rome in 1674 or 1675 and joined the Schildersbent or Bentvueghels (society of Northern artists active in Rome), which gave him the bent-name Polidoor, a reference to his favourite model, Polidoro da Caravaggio (1499-1543). In Italy – where he also lived in Padua (1676-77) and Venice (1677-79) – he was close friends with Karel Dujardin (1626-1678) and Albert Meyering (1645-1714).

Together with Meyering, he travelled from Italy to Hamburg, where he remained from 1679 to 1684. Meyering may also have accompanied him to Copenhagen during that period, when Glauber spent six months painting decorative works at Charlottenburg Castle for the military commander Ulrik Frederik Gyldenløve (1638-1704), an illegitimate son of King Frederick III of Denmark and Norway (1609-1670).

By 1684, Glauber was back in Amsterdam. He took up lodgings with his friend Gerard de Lairesse (1641-1711) and became a member of Nil Volentibus Arduum, a literary society founded in 1669 with the aim of promoting French classicism. With Lairesse, Glauber produced wall paintings for Stadholder Willem III (1659-1702) in the palaces of Het Loo and Soestdijk. The pair also decorated patrician houses, such as those of Jacob de Flines (1657-1714) in Amsterdam, and Jacques Meijers (?-1721) and Adriaen Paets I (1631-1686) in Rotterdam. When the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin II (1654-1728) visited Amsterdam in 1687, he described Glauber as the best landscape painter then living in the city. Later that same year, Johannes is recorded as a member of the Confrerie Pictura in The Hague, but it is not known if he was then living there. On 28 March 1704, at the age of fifty-nine and documented as a resident of the Noordse Bos in Amsterdam, he married forty-eight-year-old Susanna Vennekool (1656-1727), sister of the architect Steven Jacobsz Vennekool (c. 1660-1719).¹ Meyering was his witness.

When Glauber drafted a will in Amsterdam on 11 October 1711, he was a resident of Schoonhoven. There, as Houbraken reported, he spent his old age in the Proveniershuis. He is said to have died in 1726. On 17 December 1727, Susanna Vennekool, ‘widow of Johannes Glauber’, was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam.²

Glauber belongs to the third generation of Dutch Italianate painters, producing works in the international classicizing taste promulgated by French artists then active in Rome, Gaspard Dughet (1615-1675) and Claude Lorrain (1604/5-1682). Unfortunately, most of Glauber’s works are undated, making it difficult to establish a chronology throughout his peripatetic career. One painting, Wooded River Landscape with Shepherds, signed and dated 166[…], was on the Vienna art market in 2009,³ and another signed and dated painting, Landscape with a Shepherd and Flautist, from 1686, is in the Musée du Louvre, Paris (inv. no. 1301). A sketchy pen-and-wash landscape drawing, signed and dated, Amsterdam A° 1685 den 6 Julij, is preserved in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden (inv. no. C 1892-14). All these dated works seem to have been executed in Amsterdam. Glauber often collaborated with other artists, including Lairesse and Dirk Maas (1656-1717). Among Glauber’s etchings are prints after drawings by Meyering and the Monogrammist MVO (active c. 1650-80),⁴ as well as after paintings by Dughet and his friend Lairesse.⁵ His only recorded pupil was Willem Troost I (1684-1752).

Annemarie Stefes, 2017

References
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