Roman Landscape with Ruins

c. 1629 - 1630

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 56 cm × width 90 cm
outer size: depth 8 cm (support incl. frame)

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of three horizontally grained oak planks (approx. 9.5, 21.2 and 25.2 cm), approx. 0.4 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1597. The panel could have been ready for use by 1608, but a date in or after 1614 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, off-white ground extends over the edges of the support. It consists of mostly white pigment particles, with some earth pigment and a tiny amount of black pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends over the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front, leaving a reserve for the landscape with ruins in the foreground, the contours of which were adjusted later and extend over the paint of the sky. The figures were added on top. The paint was applied thinly and mostly wet in wet. The ground shows through locally, especially in the ruins on the left. The highlights and the foliage are slightly impasted. A stiff, short brush may have been used to create the latter’s typical fan shape. Small adjustments were made to the trees to the left and right of the ruin on the mountain top, as an earlier, wider version of the foliage is visible through the paint of the sky.
Erika Smeenk-Metz, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 22 September 2003
paint samples: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, nos. SK-A-3965/1-2, 1 June 2010
infrared photography: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 1 June 2010
technical report: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 1 June 2010

Condition

Fair. A transparent yellow paint used in the green of some of the foliage (especially in the lower left corner) has turned brownish. There are some small paint losses throughout and the paint surface is slightly abraded on top of the wood grain. Above the dog on the right, an old damaged area between the figures in a red and blue coat is covered with old, discoloured retouching. Some scratches and small dents are apparent at top left in the sky. Small residues of old discoloured varnish are visible in the lower parts of the paint layer. The varnish has yellowed and saturates poorly, especially in the dark areas.

Provenance

…; ? the dealer Walter M.H. Paech, Amsterdam, as P. Bril, before 1940;¹…; purchased from Meyers by the dealer P. de Boer, Amsterdam, as B. Breenbergh, July 1941;²from whom, fl. 4,000, to H. Posse, for Adolf Hitler’s Führermuseum, Linz (inv. no. 2053), as B. Breenbergh, 18 November 1941;³ war recuperation, SNK, 15 April 1946 (inv. no. NK 2317);⁴ on loan from the SNK to the museum, June 1948 (inv. no. SK-C-1378); transferred to the museum, 1960

Object number: SK-A-3965

The artist

Pieter Anthonisz van Groenewegen (? Delft c. 1600 - ? The Hague in or after 1658)

Pieter Anthonisz van Groenewegen was probably born in Delft around 1600 as the son of Anthony Huygsz van Groenewegen and Anna Jansdr Bugge, who had married in Delft in 1590. The Van Groenewegens had been one of the city’s most prominent families for several generations. The painter’s grandfather, for example, had been an alderman, member of the Council of Forty and burgomaster. There is no information about Pieter van Groenewegen’s training, but he is known to have travelled to Italy at the beginning of his career and is documented there in 1623, when he was depicted in a drawing by a member of the Bentvueghel society of Netherlandish artists in Rome,⁵ which also records his Lion nickname. He was in Italy, in other words, at the same time as Bartholomeus Breenbergh, Cornelis van Poelenburch and his fellow citizen Leonaert Bramer.

Van Groenewegen was back in Delft by 1626, when he enrolled in the local Guild of St Luke. Three of his paintings are mentioned that same year in a list of works as prizes in a lottery organized by Cornelis Cornelisz van Leeuwen. It is known from that document that Esaias van de Velde sometimes added the staffage to Van Groenewegen’s pictures, as did Christiaen van Couwenbergh. In 1633 Van Groenewegen married Jannetje Jacobsdr Ackersloot in Delft, who died not two years later.

One of the people who dealt in his paintings was the father of Johannes Vermeer, Reynier Vermeer, and the fact that Van Groenewegen acted as a witness for the latter in 1646 shows that there were other points of contact between them. On 12 March 1648 it was recorded that he owed money to the Rotterdam artist Crijn Hendrickz Volmarijn, presumably for paint. Van Groenewegen was still living in Delft at the time, but in 1657 he is documented in The Hague. He was due to enrol in the Confrerie Pictura there, but was unwilling to pay the society’s membership fee. The same matter arose again in January 1658. That was his last sign of life, so it is assumed that he died soon afterwards at an unknown location.

Van Groenewegen is said to have been the teacher of Eduard Dubois (1619-1696) of Antwerp, who stayed in Haarlem for a while before leaving for London. Horace Walpole asserted that Van Groenewegen himself also worked in Haarlem and England, but that is not verified by the sources.

Van Groenewegen focused above all on Italianate scenes, the earliest one being from 1628.⁶ He rarely dated his work, with the exception of a landscape of 1639.⁷ Johannes Vermeer used some of Van Groenewegen’s compositions in his pictures, one of them on the lid of a harpsichord. The album of drawings that Leonaert Bramer made after paintings by contemporaries, now in the Rijksmuseum,⁸ includes a still life by Van Groenewegen so he did not restrict himself to one genre alone.

Richard Harmanni, 2022

References
H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England: With Some Account of the Principal Artists, and Incidental Notes on Other Arts: Collected by the Late Mr. George Vertue, III, Strawberry-Hill 1763, p. 118; F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], I, Rotterdam 1877-78, pp. 5, 22; ibid., III, 1880-81, p. 305; ibid., IV, 1881-82, p. 67; A. Bredius, ‘Het schildersregister van Jan Sysmus, Stads-Doctor van Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 9 (1891), pp. 137-49, esp. p. 143; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, I, Leipzig/Vienna 1906, p. 619; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XV, Leipzig 1922, p. 67; B.J.A. Renckens, ‘Pieter Anthonisz. van Groenewegen’, Oud Holland 75 (1960), pp. 243-48, esp. p. 243; J.M. Montias, Artists and Artisans in Delft: A Socio-Economic Study of the Seventeenth Century, Princeton 1982, p. 125; Pijl in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXII, Munich/Leipzig 2009, p. 452

Entry

This painting with imaginary ruins and a distant view across a hilly landscape entered the museum in 1948 as a picture by Bartholomeus Breenbergh.⁹ It is unsigned, and before the Second World War it was attributed to Paul Bril.¹⁰ In 1960, however, Renckens argued convincingly that it was a work by the virtually forgotten Pieter Anthonisz van Groenewegen.¹¹ He was one of the first generation of Italianate landscapists,¹² and was the only artist in Delft producing scenes of this kind in the 1620s and ’30s.¹³ Van Groenewegen had been in Rome at the same time as Breenbergh and had clearly been influenced by him, so in that respect the former attribution had not been that far wide of the mark.

The ruins on the left are supposedly those on the Palatine in Rome. However, if one compares this painting with drawings by Pieter Mulier II and Maarten van Heemskerck, for instance,¹⁴ one sees immediately that Van Groenewegen’s hill is not at all true to life, and that the actual one served him as no more than a hazy source of inspiration. The way in which the houses are built up against the remnants bears not the slightest relation to reality. Such a flight of fancy is typical of Van Groenewegen’s landscapes. One does not get the impression that he made a series of drawings and sketches in Italy that he could consult after his return to the Netherlands.¹⁵

The layout of the painting is dominated by a massive element largely shrouded in shadow and extending into the foreground on the left, and a vista into the distance with ruins on the right. As such, the composition is related to a scene known as a view of the Forum Romanum that is dated 1629.¹⁶ However, the manner of the Rijksmuseum picture is more flowing and balanced than the one of 1629, while the difference in execution from Van Groenewegen’s earliest Italianate landscape of 1628 is even greater.¹⁷ It is known from the sources that Esaias van de Velde supplied the staffage for some of Van Groenewegen’s paintings, which prompted Renckens to go in search of some examples. He considered that the staffage in the Rijksmuseum work was also by Van de Velde,¹⁸ and that opinion was shared by Blankert.¹⁹ Comparison with the figures in a 1629 landscape by that artist in Prague shows that could certainly be the case.²⁰ There they no longer have the linear contours that characterize the early output of Van de Velde. If he really was responsible for the staffage here, then Roman Landscape with Ruins could not have been executed after 1630, the year of Van de Velde’s death. As noted above, it is not likely that it was made before 1629, which is why it is placed here around 1629-30. Dendrochronology indicates that the panel was probably only available in or after 1614,²¹ so that finding does not rule out the dating on stylistic grounds.

Richard Harmanni, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

B.J.A. Renckens, ‘Pieter Anthonisz. van Groenewegen’, Oud Holland 75 (1960), pp. 243-48, pp. 243, 245, no. 2; H.J. Ronday, Italië in de toets der Gouden Eeuw, exh. cat. Bolsward (Town Hall) 1964, p. 33; Blankert in A. Blankert, H.J. de Smedt and M.E. Houtzager, Nederlandse 17e eeuwse Italianiserende landschapschilders, exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum) 1965, pp. 88-89

Collection catalogues

1956, p. 38, no. 620 A 1 (as Bartholomeus Breenbergh); 1960, p. 57, no. 620 A1 (as Bartholomeus Breenbergh); 1976, p. 249, no. A 3965

Citation

Richard Harmanni, 2022, 'Pieter Anthonisz. van Groenewegen and Esaias van de Velde, Roman Landscape with Ruins, c. 1629 - 1630', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8578

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