AV 53

LUCAS VAN VALCKENBORCH I

Leuven after 1535 - 1597 Frankfurt am Main

A village kermesse with a mountainous landscape in the background

Signed lower right with the monogram L / VV

Panel: 11 5/8 x 16 in / 29.5 x 40.6 cm

Frame size: 17 x 21 ½ in / 43.2 x 54.6 cm

Painted circa 1572

Provenance:

Count Moltke, Copenhagen, 1871

GA Sadolin, Dragor, no.11, 1929 (his stencil on the reverse)

Edward Speelman, 1965 (exhibition catalogue no.11), from whom bought by the husband of a European private collector

Literature:

JS Sthyr, Nederlandsk Landskabmalerei I Danske Samlinger, Copenhagen 1929, p.82

A Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, Freren 1990, pp.21, 136-7, no.15, illus.

Kermesses were held on the feast day of the patron saint of the village church; they were thus solemn religious occasions and an opportunity for secular exuberance, a welcome break in the rigours of the agricultural year. Lucas van Valckenborch captures both the secular and religious spirit of the kermesse in this painting of jewel-like detail. In the left background, the priests (who are tonsured and therefore belong to a monastic order) process to church, while pious peasants kneel in homage. To the right of the church door is a booth selling ribbons, cloth and other trinkets available from merchants who travelled from fair to fair; quack doctors and tooth pullers were also a feature of these celebrations.

The foreground is given up to the riotous secular activities of the kermesse: dancing, drinking and general bawdiness. Music is provided by a man playing the bagpipes, an instrument associated (by its very shape) with licentiousness and excess. The dance takes place in the shade of two huge spreading oaks, a favourite motif of Valckenborch, fresh with green leaves and bursting with new life. The painting celebrates spring and human vitality. The oaks mark the division between the foreground and the background, with forest rolling down to a river and a line of misty blue mountains and a distant town. If the kermesse is rooted in reality, the background is an enchanted landscape like nothing ever seen in Flanders, in the tradition of the Antwerp painter Joachim Patenir (c.1480-1524).

Fourteen paintings by Valckenborch of village kermesses are known, the earliest being the circular panel dated and monogrammed 1569/VV/L formerly in the collection of Mrs N Magilp, Repton, Derbyshire (A Wied, Lucas und Marten van Valckenborch, Freren 1990, pp.133-4, no.9, illus.). The present painting is signed with the form of monogram which Valckenborch used after 1570, with the L above VV. Wied dates it circa 1572 by comparison with three other comparatively early paintings, an upright Peasant dance, circa 1570, in the Uffizi, Florence, which has been cut in half from a landscape-shaped painting (Wied pp.133-5, no.10, illus.), and two roundels, Landscape with peasants dancing, dated and monogrammed 1574/LVV (Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen, inv. no.658; Wied p.138, no.18, illus.) and Kermesse (Schlossmuseum, Schloss Friedenstein, Gotha; Wied p.139, no.20, illus.).

The theme of the kermesse derives from Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c.1525/30-1569) and was taken up by his son Pieter Brueghel the Younger (1564/5-1637/8), who was of course only an infant when Valckenborch painted the present kermesse. Valckenborch interprets Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s peasant ‘types’, for example the lusty middleaged couple dancing in the left foreground, who are similar to the couple at the left of Pieter’s Wedding dance dated 1566 at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Valckenborch may have known this work through Pieter van der Heyden’s print. Pieter Brueghel the Younger also made variations on his father’s Wedding dance. However, whereas the two Brueghels are interested in physiognomy and movement within a fairly stylised landscape, Valckenborch places his figures within naturalistic space and, in the foreground at least, northern European nature is naturalistically observed. This painting is one of Valckenborch’s most accomplished and spacious landscapes, beautifully balancing exuberance and contemplation, panorama and miniaturist detail.    

LUCAS VAN VALCKENBORCH I

Leuven after 1535 - 1597 Frankfurt am Main

Lucas van Valckenborch I came from a family of painters who originated in Leuven in the Spanish Netherlands and who for political or religious reasons moved to the more tolerant German imperial city of Frankfurt am Main. In 1560 Lucas he joined the painters’ guild in Mechelen, before fleeing in 1566 to Liège and then Aachen, where his landscape painter brother Marten van Valckenborch I (1534-1612) had settled.

In 1574-5 Lucas was in Antwerp; in 1579 he was appointed court painter to the Habsburg Archduke Matthias, who was Governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1577 to 1582 and Holy Roman Emperor 1612-1619. In 1582 Lucas followed Archduke Matthias to Linz; in 1592-3 he rejoined his relatives in Frankfurt, where he died in 1597.

Lucas van Valckenborch’s work has affinities with that of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. He depicted panoramic landscapes from a high viewpoint, but unlike his predecessors based his work on first-hand observation of nature. He painted fantastic rocky landscapes with mines and furnaces, and peasant weddings in the manner of Pieter Brueghel the Elder. Lucas often combined imaginary landscapes with real features, as in Spring landscape with the Palais Royal of Brussels (Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna).

In the mid-1580s Lucas painted a series of large pictures showing the labours of the months, probably for Archduke Matthias; five survive in the Kunsthistoriches Museum, Vienna and two in the Moravian Gallery, Brno. From the 1570s to the 1590s he experimented with striking, jewel-like close-up forest landscapes.

Lucas was a renowned painter of court portraits, working both in life-size and miniature. From 1592 onwards, after settling in Frankfurt, he produced a series of allegories of the Seasons which combine landscape, still life and genre elements. Some are market scenes with large, beautifully-observed figures, for example Meat and fish market (Winter) (Museum of Fine Art, Montreal). Georg Flegel probably contributed the still-life element in these paintings.

The work of Lucas van Valckenborch is represented in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna; the Hermitage, St Petersburg and the Museum of Fine Art, Montreal.