Aert van der Neer

Johan Giijsbert, Baron Verstolk van Soelen (1776–1845), The Hague, from whom purchased by a consortium of London collectors in 1846, said to include Thomas Baring, Samuel Jones-Loyd and Humphrey Midlmay;

Samuel Jones-Loyd, Lord Overstone (1796–1883), London, thence by descent to his daughter;

Harriet Sarah Loyd-Lindsay (née Jones-Loyd), Baroness Wantage (1837–1920), 2 Carlton Gardens, London, by 1905;

David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford (1871–1940);

Private collection.

It is the first time in 170 years that this monogrammed painting by one of the quintessential landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age has been offered for sale. This work by Aert van der Neer was once part of the celebrated collection of old master paintings amassed by Samuel Jones-Loyd, Lord Overstone (1796–1883).

Although Schulz did not indicate a dating for the canvas, it is likely to date to the 1640s or the opening years of the 1650s.¹ This painting captures a view alongside a main road leading into an imaginary quiet seventeenth-century Dutch town. Unlike so many of his paintings, much of the ground here is covered by land and not water or ice. The illusion of depth and perspective is aided most handsomely by a long diagonal path on which a well-dressed couple are walking towards a church and houses further off in the distance. This path is dissected from the right by the canal, which provides a visually pleasing triangular compositional device on which the rest of the landscape sits.

Leaving aside his skills for composition, Van der Neer was most widely known for his supreme and poetic effects with light. Indeed, it was the enduring fame of his moonlit scenes, accompanied by (we may presume) a thick layer of old murky varnish, that probably prompted Waagen and Hofstede de Groot to identify the scene as such in 1857 and 1923 respectively.

Note on Provenance

This painting was acquired in the mid-nineteenth century by the celebrated banker and liberal member of parliament for Hythe, Lord Overstone, who lived at Lockinge, near Wantage, in Oxfordshire. A close friend of the National Gallery’s first director, Sir Charles Lock Eastlake (1793–1865), Overstone’s chief interest was in works of the Dutch and Italian schools, though his taste was sufficiently wide-ranging to include some early Netherlandish and German paintings, then largely overlooked by collectors, as well as modern British art. A number of the paintings he owned, including Lucas Cranach the Elder’s two panels depicting Sts Genevieve and Apollonia and Sts Christina and Ottilia; a rare fifteenth-century Bavarian Portrait of Alexander Mornauer by the so-called Master of the Mornauer Portrait (formerly thought to be Christoph Amberger); Rembrandt’s Portrait of Margaretha Trip; and Claude’s The Enchanted Castle, made their way into the collection of the National Gallery (of which he was a trustee). The Van der Neer then passed into the collection of Harriet Sarah Loyd-Lindsay (née Jones-Loyd), Baroness Wantage, who was the sole heiress to her father Samuel Jones-Loyd, 1st Baron Overstone, and her mother Harriet Wright. It was recorded as hanging in her London town house at 2 Carlton Gardens in 1905. The painting is being offered for the first time in close to two centuries.

¹ The work seems to share an affinity in tone and colour with several recorded paintings, including a panel datable to 1640–45, sold Replica Shoes 's, Amsterdam, 30 November 2010, lot 69: https://rkd.nl/explore/images/252567; another panel of c. 1643–47, sold Replica Shoes 's, Amsterdam, 18 May 2010, lot 58: https://rkd.nl/explore/images/102461; and another canvas dated to 1650–55 at the National Gallery, London: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/aert-van-der-neer-an-evening-view-near-a-village.