JACOB GERRITSZ CUYP & AELBERT CUYP
1594 – c.1652 Dordrecht 1620 – 1691
SOLD TO THE DORDRECHTS MUSEUM
Portrait of a Boy and a Girl with a Goat and two Sheep in an Italianate Landscape
Signed JG (in ligature) Cuy..[p], and indistinctly dated centre right.
Inscribed beneath the boy lower left, AEtatis 9, and below the girl, AEtatis 7.
On canvas – 75 ¾ x 48 in (192.5 x 121.7 cms)
Sold to the Dordrechts Museum
Provenance
Malfait de Lille;
His sale, Paris, Pillet, 19 December 1864 (as Aelbert Cuyp);
Aguiot sale, Paris, Pillet, 1 March 1875, lots 3 and 4 (as Aelbert Cuyp);
Private Collection, Ireland;
With P. and D. Colnaghi, London;
Private European Collection.
Literature
C. Hofstede de Groote, A Catalogue Raisonneé.. Vol. II, London 1909, pp.43, 51, cat nos 132 (Boy) and 152 (Girl) (as Aelbert Cuyp);
A. Chong, Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp 1594-1652, exhibition catalogue, Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, 2002, p.186, under no. B2 (under uncertain attributions).
We are grateful to Frits Duparc and Fred Meijer for confirming that the present painting is an autograph work by Aelbert and Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp.
This recently rediscovered work is one of a handful of extant collaborations between Aelbert Cuyp, and his father Jacob Gerritsz, who shared a studio until the latter’s death c.1652. In the exhibition catalogue Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp published in 2002, Alan Chong listed the present painting under uncertain attributions, however recent cleaning has revealed not only Jacob Gerritsz’s signature, but also the superb autograph quality of the work, and the extensive contribution of his son Aelbert. As Frits Duparc has observed, the central landscape section with the herdsman and his cattle with ruins beyond, and the Italianate sky are entirely characteristic of Aelbert Cuyp in his early maturity, while the figures and animals in the foreground are typical of Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp. (1)
Arthur Wheelock’s introduction to the Aelbert Cuyp exhibition catalogue (2002) makes an apt introduction to the present painting:
“Aelbert Cuyp is one of the Netherlands’ greatest artists, a visual poet whose idyllic scenes of the Dutch countryside have entranced collectors and connoisseurs ever since the seventeenth century... The Netherlands that Aelbert Cuyp portrayed was a peaceful world, a verdant, sun-filled arcadia blessed with gentle breezes and billowing clouds. Shepherds tend herds of cattle and sheep graze contentedly in pastoral landscapes, travellers wend their way along well beaten paths to enjoy beautiful vistas and marvel at picturesque ruins”. (2)
To the left, a boy in a black velvet hat and rich vermillion coat holds a young goat. To the right, a girl in a blue-green dress (almost certainly his sister), a posy of flowers in her lap, and a hod or crook to her left, rests seated with two sheep. In the middle distance a herdsman tends his cattle, while beyond the remains of an ancient castle glow in the warm light of late afternoon sun. The boy’s tunic follows a Polish style very much in vogue c.1650, and much used by both Aelbert and Jacob Gerritsz, notably in the latter’s masterpiece, Portrait of Michiel Pompe van Slingeland (Dordrechts Museum) of 1649. The girl, while partly conforming to the iconography of a shepherdess, wears a courtly dress of blue-green silk, and again compares closely with a girl seated in Aelbert and Jacob Gerritsz’s collaborative work Four Children in an Italianate Landscape (private collection) dated 1645.
While the children are undoubtedly portraits, the identity of the sitters is at present unknown. The iconography of the painting is loosely based on Granida and Daifilo, the characters of a popular seventeenth century play, who were portrayed by numerous contemporary artists such as Cornelis Saftleven, Pieter de Grebber and Gerrit van Honthorst. The story relates that Princess Granida falls behind her companions during a swine hunt and becomes lost, whereupon she meets the shepherd Daifilo. They fall in love, and the Princess later flees the intrigue of the court seeking to live an idyllic life as a shepherdess with Daifilo. After a series of dramatic events, Princess Granida and the shepherd Daifilo are married, and their union blessed by the gods. The literary stimulus for Dutch ideals of arcadia hearken back to ancient Greece and Rome. Ovid above all vividly conveyed a golden age of peace and prosperity, when man lived in easy communion with nature “untroubled by any fears.. a season of everlasting spring, when peaceful zephyrs, with their warm breath, caressed the flowers”. (3)
The rich colouring and blonde tonality of the present painting, bathed in warm Italianate light, strongly suggest that this is the latest extant example of a collaboration by Aelbert and Jacob Gerritsz, and one which is closest to Aelbert’s production in the first flowering of his mature style. This is evidenced in the vigorously painted sky, with its thick impasto and feathered ‘u’ shaped brushstrokes, and wet into wet handling of the greys, blues and whites. The landscape of the middle distance and beyond is also broadly executed with painterly calligraphic strokes, illuminated and enlivened with unblended strokes of softly modulated local colour – characteristics which became increasingly prevalent in Aelbert’s work from c.1650 onwards. The delicately articulated foliage of the foreground, illuminated by warm raking sunlight is also characteristic of Aelbert’s maturing Italianate style.
Jacob Gerritsz’s understanding of anatomical structure and his ability to suggest natural movement within the confines of a formal pose is characteristic of his later portraits, and displayed here to great effect. He seems to have captured the moment just after the formal pose has been struck, when the sitters have begun to relax. The sophisticated chiaroscuro of the figures is complemented by richly coloured modelling, and this figural style served directly as a model for Aelbert’s own portraiture of the period. In particular, the young goat and sheep are exquisitely painted, and the artist has rendered the different textures of fur, wool, silks and flesh tones with consummate skill.
The painting was divided into pendants at some time prior to 1864 and subsequently reunited, a history shared by a number of Aelbert Cuyp’s larger masterpieces including the sublime View of Dordrecht in the Rothschild collection at Ascott, Bedfordshire (National Trust). Indeed our painting was long thought to be by Aelbert Cuyp in its entirety, and was catalogued as such by Hofstede de Groote (an opinion shared by Stephen Reiss, author of the 1975 Catalogue Raisonné, when he examined the painting in 1992), due to the extraordinary similarity between Aelbert’s portrait style around this time, and that of his father’s. (4)
Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp was born in Dordrecht in December 1594. Biographer Arnold Houbraken records Jacob Gerritsz as having been the pupil of Abraham Bloemaert in Utrecht and relates that the artist met Aertken Cornelisdr van Cooten there and married her in November 1618. He was Dordrecht’s most important portrait painter during the first half of the seventeenth-century, known for his sensitive, formal, and elegant depictions of some of the city’s most influential citizens and their families. In particular, he was celebrated for his portraiture of children, and it is for this which he remains most well known today.
Aelbert Cuyp was born in Dordrecht on October 20, 1620. He entered his father’s studio in the 1630’s, and initially adopted a tonal style comparable with the landscapes of Jan van Goyen (1596 – 1656). In 1642, the innovative Dutch Italianate artist Jan Both (d.1652) returned to Utrecht from Italy, bringing with him a vision of the golden light that flooded the Italian campagna, which Aelbert Cuyp began to infuse into his own art. As Wheelock observes:
“Eventually Cuyp transformed Jan Both’s gracefully rendered wooded hillsides and diffuse Italianate light into his own idiom, one that emphasised the flat expansiveness of the Dutch landscape and the atmospheric clarity of the Maas river valley. Cuyp always maintained a tangible sense of weight and mass in his landscapes, which differ fundamentally from Both’s more ethereal images. In Cuyp’s works, light does not quietly settle over the land, but streaks across the sky, its dramatic shafts illuminating clouds, trees and buildings, ships and animals, shepherds and travelers; light takes an active role, both compositionally and spiritually, enhancing the sense that the land has been blessed and protected by divine providence.” (5)
Aelbert Cuyp’s marriage in 1658 to Cornelia Boschman, the widow of a wealthy Dordrecht regent, coincided with a marked decrease in his output as an artist. Following his marriage, he became highly active in religious and social activities, serving amongst other things as a deacon and elder of the Reformed Church, and his activity as a painter appears to have ceased altogether from the early to mid 1660’s. Accordingly, his oeuvre is small with only some 120 works surviving to the present day. His classic Italianate landscapes with larger scale figures are exceptionally rare, with notable examples preserved in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and the Royal Collection.
Aelbert Cuyp’s work remained virtually unknown outside of his native city of Dordrecht until the mid eighteenth century, when a generation of English collectors, dealers and artists rediscovered his art and began avidly to collect it. Noel Joseph Desenfans (1745 – 1807), the dealer whose collection formed the basis of the Dulwich Picture Gallery, owned no less than ten works by Cuyp, while George IV amassed at least five genuine landscapes which were installed at Carlton House. John Constable and J.M.W. Turner also revered Cuyp, with Turner paying explicit homage to him in his famous Dort, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1818. Later in the nineteenth century, both Ferdinand and Alfred de Rothschild amassed works by Cuyp, as did the duke of Buckingham and the earl of Hopetoun.
(1) Frits Duparc was Director of the Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1991 – 2008. It should be noted that Aelbert and Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp frequently reused figures and animals in their various compositions, and the present painting is no exception. For example, one of the sheep on the right appears in another painting by Aelbert and Jacob, dated 1645 and jointly signed (cat rais 71, p.143 of the 2002 exhibition catalogue, Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp). Both sheep also reappear in a painting by Jacob Gerritsz and Aelbert dated 1641 (illustrated in Wheelock’s 2002 exhibition catalogue, Aelbert Cuyp, p.94, fig 1). The goat on the left is repeated in another painting by Aelbert and Jacob Gerritsz (cat rais. 54, p.135), while the herdsman in the middle distance is repeated in Aelbert Cuyp’s Ubbergen Castle (National Gallery London – illustrated in Wheelock 2002, p.155).
(2) Aelbert Cuyp, exhibition catalogue 2002 (Washington, London, Amsterdam), ed. Arthur Wheelock, p.15.
(3) Ovid, Metamorphoses, book I, lines 89-112
(4) The late Stephen Reiss, who compiled the 1975 Catalogue Raisonné on the work of Aelbert Cuyp, saw the present painting in April 1992 and opined that “The quality and style of the painting make it clear that it must be the work of Aelbert or his father Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp. They were sharing the same studio until J.G. died 1651/2. The landscape and the sky point to Aelbert, although the clump of trees behind the girl have something of a J.G. look. The figures and animals are also in the manner of J.G. but this does not necessarily rule out Aelbert’s authorship… There is no evidence to suggest that, up to the death of his father, Aelbert had any wish to break away from the portrait conventions J.G. had established. In my opinion therefore, this painting may well be, in its entirety, the work of Aelbert Cuyp”.
(5) Wheelock (ibid), pp. 27-28. The art historian Anna Jameson, writing in her Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of London published in 1844, went further, saying: “to come across upon one of Cuyp’s pictures after looking at Berghem and Both is like opening a door and stepping out into the fresh air – into heaven’s own light and earth’s verdure” (pp 17-18).