Object data
pen and brown ink, with brown and blue wash, and opaque watercolour; over traces of graphite or black chalk; framing line in brown ink
height 137 mm × width 252 mm
Marten de Cock
Hilly Landscape with a Round Chapel by the Banks of a River
1624
Inscriptions
Technical notes
watermark: none
Provenance
…; ? collection Frederik Carel Theodoor, Baron van Isendoorn à Blois, Heer van Feluy and De Cannenburch (1784-1865), Kasteel De Cannenburch, Vaassen;1 …; from the dealer J.H. Balfoort, Utrecht, fl. 30, to the museum (L. 2228), 1881
Object number: RP-T-1881-A-152
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Marten de Cock (? Antwerp 1578 - ? Augsburg 1661)
He was recorded as a resident of Amsterdam in 1630, but, according to Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726-1798), he was born in Antwerp in 1578, apparently the son of a goldsmith, and died in Augsburg in 1661. Ploos van Amstel recorded this birth and death information on the verso of a drawing in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels (inv. no. 4060/900).2 It is no longer possible to discover his source for this information, assuming that it was not simply a figment of his imagination – which is not inconceivable, for hard facts about De Cock’s career are extremely sparse. The artist might have travelled elsewhere in Europe; a drawing dated 1625 in the Rijksprentenkabinet, inv. no. RP-T-1906-21, bears the autograph annotation Copenhage, while another drawing in the Städel Museum in Frankfurt-am-Main is signed and dated Martinus de Cock. fecit in Londen den 23 Juli 1630 (inv. no. 5539). These same works, however, have also been attributed to a namesake, Marten de Cock (1605-1631), who was born in Frankfurt-am-Main and also active in the Northern Netherlands,3 who may, in fact, turn out to be the same artist.
De Cock’s oeuvre consists primarily of fully worked-up, signed imaginary landscape drawings, but it also features three etchings, one of which is signed and dated 1620 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1878-A-749),4 and one painting, dated 1631, now in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (inv. no. NM 383).5
His drawings are executed in pen and often finished with watercolour. With lively hatchings, loops and flecks, their style is somewhat conservative and fits within the mid-sixteenth-century Flemish tradition – especially the use of blue and green watercolour washes, with distinctive repoussoir elements – rather than the style of contemporary Dutch landscape artists.6 Several motifs and stylistic devices in his drawings are based on the work of Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526/1530-1569), Hans Bol (1534-1593) and Paul Bril (1554-1626). He may have been one of the many artists who emigrated to the Dutch Republic from the Spanish Netherlands.
Carolyn Mensing, 2020
References
U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, VII (1912), p. 145 (as Marten de Cock, possibly identical to Marten de Cock (1605-1631); H. Gerson and B.W. Meijer (eds.), Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Amsterdam 1983 (rev. edn.; orig. edn. 1942), pp. 46, 150, 471; F.W.H. Hollstein et al., Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, c. 1450-1700, 72 vols., Amsterdam and elsewhere 1947-2010, IV (1951), p. 194; D. Farr and W. Bradford, The Northern Landscape: Flemish, Dutch and British Drawings from the Courtauld Collections, exh. cat. New York (Drawing Center)/London (Courtauld Institute Galleries) 1986, no. 35; Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, 94 vols., Munich 1992-, XX (1998), p. 72 (as Maerten (Maarten; Marten; Martyn) de Cock (Cockus; Cocus)
Entry
De Cock’s fastidious, finicky style of drawing underwent little change throughout his career. This can be seen by comparing this early signed and dated composition from 1624 – a good example of De Cock’s carefully composed imaginary landscapes done with the pen and often finished with delicate passages of watercolour – to a very similar signed and dated drawing from 1630 in the Kunsthalle, Kiel (inv. no. AB.HZ. 166), which features a castle similarly perched atop a hill on the left of a winding river valley, with staffage along a path in the left foreground.7 The same compositional formula was used by the artist in his painting dated 1631 in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (inv. no. NM 383).8
Marijn Schapelhouman, 1998
Literature
U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, VII (1912), p. 145; O. Le Bihan, L’Or et l’ombre: Catalogue critique et raisonné des peintures hollandaises du dix-septième et du dix-huitième siècles, conservées au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, coll. cat. Bordeaux 1990, pp. 84-85 (n. 20); M. Schapelhouman and P. Schatborn, Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam: Artists Born between 1580 and 1600, 2 vols., coll. cat. Amsterdam 1998, no. 106
Citation
M. Schapelhouman, 1998, 'Marten de Cock, Hilly Landscape with a Round Chapel by the Banks of a River, 1624', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.33481
(accessed 26 November 2024 00:33:19).