Rijksmuseum

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 23.6 cm × width 32.0 cm × thickness 3.3 cm
outer size: height 34 cm × width c. 41.5 cm × depth 8 cm (support incl. frame)

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype / L. Vos / G. Albertson, RMA, 2016

Provenance

…; collection of Reinhard Baron van Lynden (1827-1891), The Hague and Huize Leyndensteyn, Beetsterzwaag, near Heerenveen; by whom bequeathed to the museum, with SK-A-1838, 1899¹

Object number: SK-A-1839

Credit line: R., Baron van Lynden Bequest, The Hague

The artist

Abraham Genoels (Antwerp 1640 - Antwerp 1723)

The artist Abraham Genoels is today chiefly known by his drawings and prints, for although both a member of the Académie royale in Paris and the Antwerp guild of St Luke his extant painted oeuvre is exiguous (See under [SK-A-1839](/en/collection/ SK-A-1839/catalogue-entry)). A good deal is known about the first half of his career when he was active in these two cities and later in Rome, but little about the second spent again in Antwerp. Baptized in the Antwerp Sint-Jacobskerk on 25 May 1640, Genoels died on 10 May 1723 and was buried in the Sint-Pauluskerk.² His training was never officially registered; by his own account (at second hand, see below) he was taught by two obscure artists Jacob Backereel and Niclaes Fierlants both active in Antwerp.³ First recorded at work in Paris, which he reached via Amsterdam when aged nineteen, he is there described as a landscapist, collaborating with Charles Le Brun (1619-1690)⁴ and his countryman Adam Frans van der Meulen (1631/1632-1690)⁵ while operating as a ‘peintre cartonnier’ (cartoon painter) in the Gobelin factory. Received into the Académie royale on 4 January 1665, his reception piece was described as ‘Un lac, & au le devant deux jeunes garçons…’ (A lake and in the foreground two young boys…).⁶ In the early 1670s he was in Antwerp and joined the guild of St Luke in the accounting year 1672/73.⁷ In 1674 he travelled to Rome, and was received into the Schildersbent with the name Archimedes,⁸ which nickname he was long to append to his signature on both his engravings and his drawings. He returned to Antwerp via Paris in 1682. Nothing remains of his work for distinguished clients in Paris, Antwerp and Rome, whose names, along with detailed accounts of the first two decades or so of his career, he had probably communicated to, and were then recounted by, Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) in his Groote Schouburgh.⁹

REFERENCES
De Wallens in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, Munich/Leipzig 1983-, LI, pp. 351-53

Entry

The attribution of the present landscape and SK-A-1838, whose supports are unlined and on their original ‘pegged strainers’, to Abraham Genoels stems from the inscribed label on the reverse of the latter and dates from at least the time when they were in the Van Lynden collection, from which they were bequeathed to the Rijksmuseum. It has, for instance, been accepted by Salerno and Bodart without demur.¹⁰ However, an attribution to Genoels is problematic, for although his engraved and graphic work is reasonably well known as is the fact that he was active as a painter,¹¹ his extant painted oeuvre, which may never have been extensive, is now exiguous.¹² It seems to consist chiefly of two stylistically very different paintings: a Minerva and the Muses in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp,¹³ and an Angelica and Medoro in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig.¹⁴ Indeed, Kämmerer in a dissertation of 1975 considered attributing the Rijksmuseum paintings to Johannes Glauber (1646-c. 1726).¹⁵

However, despite the poor state of the Antwerp painting¹⁶ and judging only from a photograph of it, there would appear to be a stylistic affinity between it and the two Rijksmuseum pictures (both unlined and on their original stretchers). Further there are connections to be made between it and some of Genoels’s engraved work.¹⁷ These factors, together with the old ascription on the label of SK-A-1838, warrant the maintenance of an attribution to him.

Compared with the Antwerp painting, thought to have been painted there in 1670, the Rijksmuseum paintings show the just perceptible influence in the treatment of the landscape of the work of Gaspar Dughet (1625-1675) which would have impacted after Genoels’s arrival in Rome in 1675.¹⁸ But there seems no means of knowing whether they were executed during his stay in Rome or after his return to Antwerp in 1682, but the latter is suggested above.

SK-A-1839 was bequeathed as depicting Apollo and Calliope which title has been retained by the museum. Calliope, the muse of epic poetry, could well have been depicted holding a trumpet, and she did have relations with Apollo (as she is recorded as bearing his child, the obscure Linus).¹⁹ But that the seated figure holding a tambourine should be seen as the sun god seems far-fetched. And, furthermore, there seems no good reason for Calliope to be so placed; this figure, which seems more imposing than a woodland nymph, still requires identification.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

D. Bodart, Les Peintres des Pays-Bas Méridionaux et de la Principauté de Liège à Rome au XVIIème siècle, 2 vols., Brussels/Rome 1970, I, p. 337; L. Salerno, Pittori di paesaggio del Seicento a Roma/Landscape painters of the Seventeenth Century in Rome, 3 vols., Rome 1980, III, p. 1030, under note 2; B. Biard, ‘Les Paysages de Francisque Millet’, L’Estampille/L’Objet d’Art 307 (1996), p. 1018

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 105, no, 979; 1976, p. 241, no. A 1839

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'attributed to Abraham Genoels, Nymph and Shepherd Making Music in a Landscape, c. 1685', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8484

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