Object data
oil on panel
support: height 39.3 cm × width 52.2 cm
outer size: depth 4.7 cm (support incl. frame)
Willem van den Bundel
View of a Village
1623
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower right: WBVNDEL / 1623
Technical notes
The support is a relatively thick (1.3 cm) oak panel consisting of two horizontally grained planks joined with a lip join, and is bevelled on all sides. The ground layer is thin and whitish. The artist worked from the background to the foreground. The figures, which were painted on top of the landscape, are in a draughtsman-like style and detailed. A very fine brush was used for the leaves of the bushes and the trees in the centre.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 6 June 2005
Condition
Fair. The painting is abraded, especially in the trees on the left, and there are discoloured retouchings along the panel join. The varnish has yellowed.
Conservation
- H. Plagge, 1963: treatment unknown
Provenance
...; sale, J.D. Kruseman, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 11 February 1919, no. 15, fl. 1,150,1 to the dealer D. Komter; from whom purchased by the museum, 1920
Object number: SK-A-2835
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Willem van den Bundel (Brussels 1577 – Delft 1655)
Willem van den Bundel was born in Brussels in 1577, and as a child moved to Antwerp with his parents and then to Delft. From 1597 he was in Amsterdam, studying with Gillis van Coninxloo II, the landscape and still-life painter who also came from Antwerp. Van den Bundel married Susanna Wicart in 1600, and three years later they were documented as living in Delft. In 1607, the year when the estate of his former teacher was put up for auction, he was again living in Amsterdam, near the St Anthonis poort. His wife died in late 1615, and in 1617 he married again, his second wife being Marijtgen Cornelisdr. On 7 April 1614 he bought several paintings at an auction of works by the Amsterdam portrait painter Cornelis van der Voort. On 25 November 1619 he attested to the authenticity of a painting by Caravaggio. His name is recorded in 1615 and 1620 in connection with the valuation of paintings. On 25 February 1620 he and Barend van Someren valued a painting by Cornelis van der Voort, and on 3 April of that year he appraised another one, this time by Isaac van Coninxloo. In 1621 he is documented as a gilder of picture frames. He was living in Delft at the time, where he is recorded as a member of the Guild of St Luke in 1623, of which he was warden in 1634, 1635 and 1639. In 1631 his name surfaces in the Delft and Dordrecht archives, and in 1634 a painting of his was one of the prizes in a lottery in Haarlem. He was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft on 12 January 1655.
Van den Bundel painted wooded landscapes that owe a great debt to painters like Gillis van Coninxloo, Gillis de Hondecoeter and Roelant Savery. Only a few of his works are dated. The earliest is one of 1623 in the Rijksmuseum, and the latest is a woodland landscape of 1651.2 An inventory of 1644 lists a landscape by Van den Bundel with figures by Palamedesz. Other masters who painted the staffage in his paintings were Barend van Someren, Jan Nagel and Simon Jordaens.
Van den Bundel’s son Willem Willemsz (?-1623) was also a painter, but there are no works that have been securely attributed to him.
Gerdien Wuestman, 2007
References
Moes in Thieme/Becker V, 1911, p. 222; Bredius 1920; Grabach in Saur XV, 1991, p. 134; Briels 1997, pp. 307-08; Liedtke 2001, p. 85
Entry
This woodland scene with farmhouses and a church tower in the distance was executed in 1623, which makes it Van den Bundel’s earliest dated painting, although by then he was already 46 years old. Bredius rightly observed that the landscape in the Rijksmuseum could equally well have been painted by Van den Bundel’s son of the same forename, who was buried on 8 December of that year.3 His theory cannot be dismissed out of hand, but on the evidence of similarities to works that are datable later it seems reasonable to assume that this is a work by the elder Van den Bundel.
The landscape with the rather clumsy perspective of the winding path in the foreground was inspired by the work of Flemish painters like Van den Bundel’s teacher Gillis van Coninxloo, Gillis de Hondecoeter and the Savery brothers.4 As to the way the trees are rendered, Liedtke noted a relationship with the work of Adriaen van de Venne, David Vinckboons and Alexander Keirincx.5
The staffage reminded Bredius of the work of Pieter Brueghel.6 That certainly applies to the oversized heron flying over the trees at top right, but the well-observed figures in the foreground are more reminiscent of artists like Esaias van de Velde and Jan van Goyen. Given the high standard of those figures in a work by a landscape specialist, they are very probably not by Van den Bundel himself. They may be by Esaias van de Velde, who worked in The Hague and supplied the staffage for so many artists.7
Gerdien Wuestman, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 40.
Literature
Bredius 1920, pp. 65-66, 69; Liedtke 2001, p. 85
Collection catalogues
1934, pp. 66-67, no. 658a; 1960, pp. 63-64, no. 658 B 1; 1976, p. 157, no. A 2835; 2007, no. 40
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Willem van den Bundel, View of a Village, 1623', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8099
(accessed 27 December 2024 22:30:14).