Bartholomeus Breenbergh

With Bernard Houthakker, Amsterdam, 1964,

where acquired by F.C. Butôt, Sankt Gilgen,

his estate sale, Amsterdam, Replica Shoes 's, 16 November 1993, lot 68,

where acquired by Myron Kaplan

Salzburg, Museumpavillon in Mirabellgarten; Münster, Westfälisches Landesmuseum; and Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Niederländische Kunst aus dem Goldenen Jahrhundert, 1972-3;

Munich, Replica Shoes 's, A selection of paintings and drawings from the Collection of F.C. Butôt, 1989

M. Roethlisberger, Bartholomäus Breenbergh, Handzeichnungen, Berlin 1969, p. 26, no. 32;

L. Bol and G. Keyes, Netherlandish Paintings and Drawings from the Collection of F. C. Butot: by little-known and rare masters of the seventeenth century, London 1981, p. 27 and p. 176, no. 71, reproduced;

M. Roethlisberger, Bartholomeus Breenbergh, The Paintings, Berlin/New York 1981, p. 61, under no. 139;

I. Fechter, review of Munich exhibition, 1989, Weltkunst 59, no. 12, p. 1768

Breenbergh used this drawing, somewhat freely, as the basis for the ruins on the right of his 1632 painting, Landscape with the Journey to Emmaus (fig. 1).¹ Although Roethlisberger was uncertain in 1969 that the ruins represented were those of the Baths of Diocletian, he accepted this identification when writing about the drawing again in 1981. Breenbergh drew extensively while in Italy from 1619 until circa 1629: some of these drawings serve as topographical records, but many capture nothing more concrete than the searing southern light that seems to have so astonished the artists from the north who travelled to Italy at this time. Breenbergh, together with other painters such as Cornelis van Poelenburch (see lot 209) and Jan Asselijn, adopted as a dominant pictorial device a kind of 'overexposed' illumination, in which the lightest areas of the composition seem so intensely irradiated by the sun that they are all but bleached.

In Breenbergh's work, this approach is most lyrically expressed in drawings such as this, which is an unusually large and worked-up example of such a study; most of his Italian landscape studies are the size of one of these two joined sheets.

^1.Warsaw, National Museum, inv. no. 231630; see Roethlisberger, op.cit., 1981, pl. 139, reproduced