Rijksmuseum

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 23.6 cm × width 32 cm
outer size: depth 4 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

inscription, on the reverse, on an old label: Genoel.

Scientific examination and reports

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

Provenance

…; collection Reinhard Baron van Lynden (1827-1891), The Hague and Huize Leyndensteyn, Beetsterzwaag, near Heerenveen; by whom bequeathed to the museum, with SK-A-1839, 1899¹

Object number: SK-A-1838

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

Although the female figure in antique costume, right, holding an arrow and hunting spear has no distinguishing emblem of a crescent moon on her forehead, she may well have been intended to represent the goddess Diana, famed as a huntress, particularly in view of the servile attitude of the nymph who offers her a bow. The subject has been so identified since it entered the museum.

The present picture, whose support is unlined and on its original ‘pegged strainer’, is evidently by the same artist as another in the collection, Nymph and Shepherd Making Music in a Landscape (SK-A-1839), also long considered to be Abraham Genoels. Indeed, the present picture has been said to be signed on the reverse. But it is doubtful whether the inscription on the label, attached to the stretcher, can be described as a signature; written most likely in an eighteenth-century hand when Genoels was better known than he is today, the label could rather be that of a dealer or early owner.¹⁰

Although the same size as SK-A-1839, it seems not strictly speaking a pendant; perhaps both are best described as being a set of two or part of a larger series of picturesque landscapes. For further discussion, see SK-A-1839.

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. 978; 1976, p. 241, no. A 1838

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'attributed to Abraham Genoels, Diana and Her Nymphs Hunting, c. 1685', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8485

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