SALOMON VAN RUYSDAEL

A wijdschip and other small Dutch vessels on an estuary, with a church in the distance

Signed with initials lower right: SvR Oil on panel: 8 x 12 in / 21.9 x 31.4 cm Painted circa 1642

Salomon van Ruysdael was one of the greatest of Dutch landscapists, whose career, spanning from the 1620s to the 1660s, covered a period in which, after eighty years’ struggle, the United Provinces were finally freed from Spanish Habsburg control. Van Ruysdael’s extraordinarily inventive depictions of dunescapes, river views, country inns, marines and winter scenes captured the spirit of a country where hard-won identity was bound up with a deep love of the unique local landscape.

Living in a land fissured by large and small waterways, the Dutch became expert sailors. This view of an estuary is a superb example of one of the poetic, small views in which Ruysdael shows a shimmering expanse of water meeting a vast sky of moving clouds which rip asunder to reveal snatches of blue sky. The predominant tonality is blue and grey-blue, giving the scene a dreamlike tranquillity and the small ships a ghostlike beauty. The most prominent vessel is a wijdschip, the dependable cargo-carrying vessel used on the Zuider Zee and the delta of South Holland.

Jan Van Goyen

A view of Rupelmonde Castle on the Scheldt, with boats in the foreground

Signed with initials and dated lower centre: VG 1651 Oil on panel: 26 ¼ x 35 in / 66.7 x 90.5 cm

Few artists have captured the spirit of the Netherlands, with its waterways mirroring huge skies, as well as Jan van Goyen. He could work effortlessly on every scale from small cabinet paintings to the expansive size employed here. Van Goyen was master of the ‘tonal’ landscape, using soft, gradated hues of brown and pale blue to conjure up the moisture-laden, wind-ruffled terrain. His works of the 1630s have a golden-brown hue. He returned to ‘tonal’ landscapes at the start of the 1650s, the era in which this view of Rupelmonde Castle was made. Strong, horizontal compositions are also characteristic of this phase, giving an airy sense of panorama.

Van Goyen travelled the length and breadth of the Netherlands throughout his career, making brilliantly atmospheric sketches in black chalk, which he used as inspiration for his oil paintings. The deep love of the unassuming Dutch landscape sprang from a sense of national identity: the northern Netherlands had revolted against its Spanish Habsburg overlords in the 1580s. The conflict, although sporadic, was not resolved until the Treaty of Münster in 1648, three years before this painting was made. Van Goyen travelled south to Antwerp and Brussels, the most important towns of the Spanish Netherlands, at the end of the 1640s. Rupelmonde Castle guarded the confluence of the rivers Rupel and Scheldt. The Scheldt, a river of crucial strategic importance for centuries, is the key artery leading to Antwerp, then the Spanish Netherlands’s chief port.

JAN DAVIDSZ. DE HEEM

Still life with apricots on a pewter plate, a cut lemon and other fruit, with a rummer of white wine and a Venetian-style wine glass on a table covered with a green cloth, wreathed with a vine branch

Signed and dated lower left: JD. De heem. ƒ. A° 1652

Oil on panel: 14 x 21 ½ in / 36.2 x 53.7 cm

Jan Davidsz. de Heem was one of most important and innovative still life painters of the seventeenth century, with a career that straddled both the northern and southern Netherlands. He was born in Utrecht, part of the United Provinces, the son of a musician from Spanish-controlled Antwerp. By 1652, when this painting was made, de Heem had a flourishing career in Antwerp with an international clientele, in addition to the wealthy Antwerp bourgeoisie and Flemish nobility.

Still lifes of fruit are prominent in de Heem’s oeuvre in the first half of the 1650s. The artist and writer Joachim von Sandrart claimed that around 1636 de Heem moved to Antwerp, the major port of the southern Netherlands, because ‘there one could have rare fruit of all kinds and sizes, plums, peaches, cherries, oranges, lemons, grapes and others in fine condition and state of ripeness to portray from life’.

This painting shows the exquisite balance of de Heem’s compositions and his rich use of colour, influenced by the Flemish tradition which inspired Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) and Frans Snyders (1579-1657). De Heem had an extraordinary, painterly command of textures, from the glistening ruby flesh of the cut fig, to the complex reflections on the rummer’s shiny surface, to the bloom on the plums and apricots. The trompe l’oeil effect is enhanced by the pewter plate which juts out from the edge of the table and the insects which hover around the glorious assemblage of fruit.

JEAN-BAPTISTE MONNOYER

Still life of flowers in a gilt urn with fruit on a ledge

Signed lower right: Baptiste.p. Oil on canvas: 51 x 41 in / 129.5 x 104.1 cm Painted circa 1670

Jean-Baptiste Monnoyer worked for Louis XIV, collaborating with Charles Le Brun, the Court painter, on decorations for the Grand Trianon at Versailles and the châteaux at Meudon and Marly. He was celebrated for his lavish, baroque still lifes of flowers and fruit. Monnoyer here places his bouquet in a gilt urn on a table top. The serpentine composition leads the eye from top right to bottom left and down through the swags of fruit to the orange blossom at centre right. The flowers and fruit are dramatically lit, emerging out of the gloom so that the brightest blooms, such as the pale pink and white roses, apple blossom and viburnum, seem to pulsate with light. The texture of the fruit is exquisitely rendered. Monnoyer is particularly skilled in depicting complex, delicate flowers such as the twisting, yellow-and-pink honeysuckle blossom, which is detailed down to the feathery stamens.

Like most seventeenth century flower painters, Monnoyer places flowers that bloom at different seasons into a pleasing ensemble. To do so, he must have relied on drawn studies or perhaps oil sketches kept in the studio as reference. The three pale pink roses almost at the centre of the composition are Damask roses (Rosa damascena), so called because they were thought to have been introduced to England by Crusaders returning from Syria.

Godfried Schalcken

Portrait of a young lady as the goddess Diana attended by her nymphs, in a forest with a hunting dog

Signed lower left: G. Schalcken

Oil on canvas: 20 ¾ x 17 in / 52.7 by 44.1 cm

Painted circa 1680-85

This painting is a portrait historié, with the sitter presented as the goddess Diana, the chaste huntress: a fitting analogy for a young girl who would soon be launched on the marriage market. The work subtly balances fierceness with softness. ‘Diana’s’ steely nature is indicated by the arrow-head which she holds and the brilliantly realistic hunting dog. In the distance is a tiny male figure, a reference to Actaeon, who in Ovid’s Metamorphoses was changed by Diana into a stag and slaughtered by his own hounds for the sin of stumbling upon the goddess while she was bathing. This rather forbidding presentation of the goddess-sitter is gently undercut by the shimmering, sensuous composition, by her pearly, luminescent skin and the palette of soft gold, rose, blue and white in the trailing draperies.

A pupil of the Leiden fijnschilder Gerrit Dou, Godfried Schalcken became the most fashionable portrait painter in Dordrecht. This work, with its Classical references, would have appealed to the élite of that city. Schalcken was highly educated and certainly knew Ovid’s poetry in the original, being the son of Cornelius Schalckius, Rector of the Latin School. First intended for the Church, Godfried originally studied theology, which demanded knowledge of Latin and Greek. However, in the words of his fellow townsman, Arnold Houbraken, Schalcken’s ‘love of art made him bid farewell to the study of languages, even though he was far advanced in them’.

WILLEM VAN MIERIS

A trumpeter at a window, with a man holding an upturned wine glass

Signed and dated lower right: W van Mieris. Fe. 1689 Oil on panel: 9 ½ x 7 in / 24.1 x 19.4 cm

Willem van Mieris worked in the tradition of the Leiden fijnschilders (fine painters), artists who executed small-scale genre works with a high degree of elegance and finish. The pioneer was Rembrandt’s pupil Gerrit Dou (1613-1675). Willem was trained by his father Frans van Mieris the Elder (1635-1681), an internationally renowned and highlypaid artist. Leiden was famed for its textiles and one of the major patrons of Willem’s later career was the cloth magnate Pieter de la Court van der Voort.

This work, painted when Willem was in his twenties, echoes the rich baroque palette employed by his father, while the composition set in a niche for trompe l’oeil effect was of a type first introduced by Dou. The archaic dress and military accoutrements of the two men look back to an earlier age, the swaggering, fashionable part-time militia soldiers of Rembrandt’s Night Watch. While Willem pokes gentle fun at the pretentiousness and louche lifestyle of his protagonists, he lavishes all his genius as a fijnschilder upon them. The textures of the satin and lace costumes, rich silk banner and colourful Oriental carpet are superbly delineated. The white feather dangling in front of the bas-relief of tumbling putti is so convincing that one could almost reach out and touch it.

Rachel Ruysch

Still life of a bouquet of pink and white roses, poppy anemones, primroses, forget-me-nots, jonquils, daffodils, snowballs, honeysuckle and a tulip in a glass vase, with a bird’s nest

Signed and dated upper left: Rachel Ruysch / 1738

Oil on canvas: 17 ¼ x 15 ¼ in / 44 x 39 cm

Rachel Ruysch was the most successful Dutch woman artist of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Like her rival Jan van Huysum (1682-1749), she regularly sold her flowerpieces for more than 1,000 florins - almost three times the annual wage of a tradesman. Daughter of the anatomist and botanist Dr Frederik Ruysch, Rachel grew up in an atmosphere of intellectual ferment and gained her exquisite understanding of flowers from studying them in the Amsterdam botanic garden, which her father directed.

Ruysch produced paintings with undiminished skill into her eighties. This work was made in 1738, when she was seventy-four. The shift from a dark, to a lighter, greenish background and the massing of pastel pink flowers at the centre of bouquet show Ruysch responding to the lighter palette made fashionable by the Rococo. Also characteristic of Rococo taste are the delicate blue forget-me-nots and double hyacinth at the left. The prevalence of blue in the Rococo palette can be attributed to the availability of a new pigment, Prussian blue, which was discovered in Germany early in the eighteenth century. Ruysch seems to have been the first Dutch artist to use it, probably obtaining it from her sister (and fellow painter) Anna and brother-in-law Isaac Hellenbroeck, who were dealers in artists’ pigments in Amsterdam. Ruysch’s scientific background and quest for modernity, combined with her artistic genius, give this bouquet its vitality and beauty.