Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 88 cm × width 107 cm
outer size: depth 6.2 cm (support incl. frame)
anonymous
Elegant Company at an Antique Fountain in a Glade
Southern Netherlands, c. 1660 - c. 1670
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: G. Tauber / L. Nijkamp, RMA, 30 August 2006
Conservation
- Van der Haeghen: relined
- conservator unknown, 1903: treated
Provenance
…; recorded as a chimney piece in Laan 5, The Hague, the premises of the Stadsapotheek, 1844-81;1…; bequeathed by Arnoldus Andries des Tombe (1818-1902), The Hague, to the museum, 1903
Object number: SK-A-2096
Credit line: A.A. des Tombe Bequest, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
Entry
Bequeathed as attributed to the French School and later recognized as being south Netherlandish, the condition and poor handling are such that a more precise attribution would be foolhardy.
The theme of an elegant company in a landscape had been popularized in the southern Netherlands by the woodcuts by Christoffel Jegher (1596-1653) after Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577-1640) Conversation à La Mode (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). 2
The motif of a classical-style fountain in a wooded landscape was treated by the Antwerp landscape painter Gaspar de Witte (1624-1681), in whose pictures the staffage was usually contributed by a collaborator, for instance, Erasmus Quellinus II (1607-1678) as in the picture formerly in a private collection, Brussels.3 That picture is recorded as signed and dated by De Witte 1654 and also signed with Quellinus’s initials. The Rijksmuseum work was probably executed later, in the 1660s, to judge from the costumes of the elegant company.
The marble fountain – seemingly out of place in a glade – was intended to be antique and may not have been imaginary; it consists of an urn supported by a river god on a plinth above a sculpted basin.
Gregory Martin, 2022
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 4, no. 33 (as anonymous French school, last half of the seventeenth century); 1934, p. 4, no. 33 (as anonymous French school, last half of the seventeenth century); 1976, p. 693, no. A 2906 (as Southern Netherlandish school)
Citation
G. Martin, 2022, 'anonymous, Elegant Company at an Antique Fountain in a Glade, Southern Netherlands, c. 1660 - c. 1670', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6641
(accessed 13 November 2024 06:03:21).