RKD STUDIES

136 MUSEUM OF AMSTERDAM.

... finest and most intimate fibers, he enveloped her in a tender and mysterious harmony.

A charming young man, a bit of a dreamer like a poet, gentle as a girl, sympathetic to all the artists of his time. A collaborator of his master, Wijnants,¹ – a friend of Wouwerman, who had also studied with Wijnants, Adriaan lent his talent to Van der Heijden, Moucheron, Jan Hackaert, Hobbema and Ruijsdael, and even to less famous landscape painters like Abraham Verboom.²

His portrait, graceful and smiling, can be seen in the Van der Hoop Museum, in the masterpiece in which he portrayed himself with his wife and children, in the middle of a beautiful landscape [214];³ because he always needed trees and the light of the sky. He never painted a scene that did not take place in the open air.

The Amsterdam museum has only two paintings by him: a small "Landscape with Figures and Cattle"[215],⁴ and another "Landscape with a thatched cottage"[216].⁵

The small landscape, only 1 foot wide and 1 foot 3 inches high, is delightful. Near a fountain stand some peasants with their flocks: a shepherd, seen from behind, on his donkey, a woman in red, on a roan horse, a woman on foot, standing chatting with her. A few sheep and the shepherd's dog. A cow drinks from the fountain in the shade on the left, where a small rocky hill rises. On the right, by the water, with a ferry carrying a flock.

137 ADRIAAN VAN DE VELDE.

A small standing figure, facing the ferry, watches him approach. Dated 1666. "A highly-studied and beautiful production," Smith says.⁶

The other landscape (no. 304)⁷ is far more significant and even of superior quality. Smith calls it a "very capital and admirably-finished picture".⁸ It comes from distinguished collections: Braamcamp, 1771, 2,420 guilders; Valkenier, Amsterdam, 1796, 4,020 guilders; here the price has already doubled; Gildemeester, 1800, 4,825 guilders; and General Brentano, 1822, 8,290 guilders; here the price has doubled a second time. We can increase tenfold the amount in the Braamcamp auction (1).

There are only two figures, about 4 inches high: a shepherdess and a peasant. The shepherdess sits in front of the door of a thatched-roofed cottage at the foot of a wooded hill that occupies two-thirds of the canvas; this is the only flaw in the composition, but Adriaan no doubt wanted to make it a kind of small, solitary oasis. This young woman, wearing an azure skirt and half-open bodice, catches sunlight on her half-naked neck. The tightly constricted corset is not fashionable in these rural parts. However, a young neighbor passes by, riding his white horse without a saddle and carrying a basket on his arm. He too is dressed informally: he has bare legs and a reddish ...

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(1) The new cat. gives only part of the provenance. The date 1666 on the previous painting is not given.

138 MUSEUM OF AMSTERDAM.

... jacket. He is heading for the fields or the forest. Why wouldn't he stop for a chat? We can only see his back, but we can guess that he could be talking to the shepherdess about it being fine weather for love, – honestly, and not in the manner of Jan Steen.

The entire foreground of the landscape is a meadow where sheep and cows are scattered. Near the hut is a large tree without a crown. Beautiful signature: A. V. Velde f, and the year 1671. The following year Adriaan van de Velde died, only thirty-three years old!

The canvas is approximately 2 feet 4 inches high and 2 feet wide (1).

Figures of Adriaan can be found in the paintings of four painters in the Amsterdam Museum.

First, the old Wijnants. He was forty years older than his beloved pupil and lived several years after him. At seventy-five, he was still painting with as much verve as finesse. The museum in The Hague has a painting of his from 1675 [217]. What is curious is that the catalogs of the museums in Holland, including that of The Hague, give 1670 as Wijnants' date of death! The only exception is the catalog of the Van der Hoop Museum, which gives 1677 as the date (2).

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(1) 74 by 63 centimeter (new cat.).
(2) The compilers of the new cat., who apparently know little about the Hague museum, still give 1670 ...

139 ADRIAAN VAN DE VELDE.

So Wijnants was between sixty and seventy years old when Adriaan added graceful figurines to his landscapes. Since Adriaan died in 1672, it was mainly Lingelbach who further made the staffage in the paintings from Wijnants' last period, since Philips Wouwerman had also died in 1668. Thus, one after another, the old master lost his two most capable and illustrious disciples. Adriaan van Ostade, to whom he had once turned, was by then quite old himself, being born in 1610. I mention these chronological facts because they can help identify the dates of Wijnants' works. It is first – rarely – Ostade who helps him; then Wouwerman, then Van de Velde, then Lingelbach. However, this sequence is not strict, as sometimes they all worked with Wijnants at the same time.

It should be noted here that Philips Wouwerman was almost twenty years older than Adriaan van de Velde, and they could never have been apprentices in Wijnants' studio at the same time, as French biographers, and in particular the editor of the Louvre catalog, assume. Philips was already a very renowned painter and could not keep up with his commissions before the young Van de Velde, who was nevertheless so precocious, began his first scribbles at Wijnants.

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... as the date of Wijnants' death! No doubt based on some written document; but the works of the masters themselves are more reliable than any paperwork.

140 MUSEUM OF AMSTERDAM.

Jan Wijnants is one of the most important founders (that ugly word can apply here) of Dutch landscape painting. All simple landscape painters of his country followed his inspiration to some extent, namely, to look very closely at nature, to study its details, to conscientiously and delicately allow its small fantasies, to worship the infinite variety in unity.

Rembrandt, on the other hand, was the other great originator of the kind of pantheism that characterizes Dutch landscape painters. He, the poet who contemplated from above and from afar, taught us to see nature as a whole, in its immense planes, and he sometimes covered whole stretches of ground by spreading his brush over a horizontal strip an inch wide. Philips Koninck⁹ and Jacob Ruijsdael often imitated him in these bird's-eye views of the earth.

It seems that despite his long life, Wijnants did not produce many, perhaps because of his rather meticulous way of working;¹⁰ because the four main museums in the Netherlands have only thirteen Wijnants: the Amsterdam museum, 4; the Van der Hoop museum, 4; the Hague museum, 2; the Rotterdam museum, 3.¹¹ The Louvre also has only 3; Dresden, 3; Vienna, 2; Munich, 4 or 5; Berlin, none at all.¹² In Manchester, there were only two, which were insignificant.¹³ Smith, however, had 176 in his catalog, most in English collections, and others that, having been auctioned long ago, have disappeared from view.¹⁴