AY 217

 

JAN VAN DE CAPPELLE

1626 – Amsterdam – 1679

 

A winter landscape with skaters and a colf player on a frozen waterway by a village

 

Signed and dated lower left: JV cappelle A 1653

Panel: 15 3/8 x 24 ½ in / 39.1 x 62.2 cm

 

Provenance:

Acquired by a private collector (Anfuso) in Rome circa 1935;

by descent to his nephew

 

 

Jan van de Cappelle was both an artist of genius and a rich man; he painted for his own pleasure and his oeuvre numbers only about 150 works, chiefly marines. Fewer than twenty winter scenes by him are known. This newly-discovered painting is an important addition to works in this group, which all seem to have been executed between 1652 and 1654. 

 

Van de Cappelle borrowed motifs from the winter scenes of Hendrick Avercamp and fellow-Amsterdammer Aert van der Neer, twenty-three years his senior, who was sliding towards bankruptcy on the Kalverstraat while van de Cappelle held court on the fashionable Keizersgracht. This painting shows his exquisite feeling for the rendition of light and atmosphere, a preoccupation which also dominates his marine works. The scene is unified through a palette composed almost entirely of black, brown and white, linking the scuffed expanse of ice with a sky full of shifting, vaporous clouds. Van de Cappelle’s subtle and deep composition is achieved through a mastery of scientific perspective in which the placing of figures and bare-branched trees leads the eye far into the landscape. His austere yet poetic picture captures the eerie chill and calm of a winter’s day, with a boat half-coffined in ice, villagers trudging with their hands in their pockets and a man playing a solitary game of colf.

 

Only a handful of van de Cappelle’s winter landscapes are painted on panel and this is the only one to be dated. Three other winter scenes dated 1653 are known, all on canvas: the paintings in the Mauritshuis, The Hague, the Frits Lugt Collection at the Institut Néerlandais, Paris and the work formerly in the Heinemann Collection, sold after the sale at Christie’s London on 4th July 1997, lot 16. The difference in support probably accounts for the silvery-blue tonality of the canvas pictures, though they correspond closely to the present work in structure and spirit. The closest comparable work to the present painting is the undated panel in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Madrid, which shares its soft brown monochromatic tonality and features an identical drawbridge in the centre background.

JAN VAN DE CAPPELLE

1626 – Amsterdam – 1679

 

Jan van de Cappelle is one of the finest Dutch marine and landscape painters of the seventeenth century, but, astonishingly, he was an amateur who never joined the Guild of St Luke. He was born in Amsterdam in 1626. His father Franchoys owned a successful dye-works in which both Jan and his brother Louis were active. Franchoys probably managed the firm until shortly before his death in 1674, giving Jan plenty of leisure to pursue his hobby, painting. He married the wealthy Annetje Jansdr. (Anna Grootingh) before 1653 and lived on the fashionable Keizersgracht. At his death in 1679 Jan’s seven children inherited the dye-works, immense cash assets, property and an outstanding art collection that included seven paintings and 500 drawings by Rembrandt, 1,300 drawings by Simon de Vlieger, 900 drawings by Hendrick Avercamp and three paintings by Rubens. Jan and his wife were painted by Rembrandt and Frans Hals (portraits now untraced).

 

Fewer than 150 works by van de Cappelle are known, mostly marine paintings. He owned a pleasure yacht, moored in the ‘oude yacht haven’, and no doubt took many trips along the Dutch coast and rivers, sketching from nature. Paintings are dated between 1644 (an untraced Winter scene) and 1663. In 1654 Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Rembrandt’s pupil and friend, wrote a quatrain in the album amicorum of the humanist Jacob Heyblocq (now in the Royal Library in The Hague), in which he mentions the art of Jan van de Cappelle ‘bij hem selfs uijt eygen lust geleert’ (‘who taught himself to paint out of his own desire’). Van de Cappelle must, however, have had a close formative association with the marine painter Simon de Vlieger and also with Willem van de Velde the Elder.

 

Van de Cappelle’s 1654 painting of Shipping in a calm (D Robarts Collection, England) emulates the luminous treatment of sky and water of de Vlieger’s beach scenes of the 1640s, but also pioneers a new approach to marine painting, with a group of large ships close to the picture plane and the diminishing forms of other ships leading in strict linear perspective towards the far horizon. A sheet of perspective studies by de Vlieger, signed and dated the same year (British Museum, London) suggests that both de Vlieger and van de Cappelle were experimenting with ship perspectives in response to new optical discoveries. Van de Cappelle was particularly fascinated with light and reflections in calm conditions, culminating in his early masterpiece A calm (Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne).

 

In the late 1640s and early 1650s van de Cappelle perfected the marine ‘parade’ picture, which shows a formal gathering of ships for ceremonial occasions, for example A State Barge saluted by the Home Fleet, 1650 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). The geometric precision of the ships’ alignment and the clarity of their forms contrasts with the fluidity of light. Other paintings feature small craft and fishermen, or passenger barges drifting along the banks of a river; luminous atmosphere softens outlines and unifies forms and local colours. Van de Cappelle’s earlier works employ the cool, silvery hues of de Vlieger, while his later paintings have a warmer golden tonality, influenced by Salomon van Ruysdael’s late sunsets. The majority of van de Cappelle’s marines show boats seen across an expanse of calm water; he rarely depicted rough water.

 

Fewer than twenty fully authenticated winter scenes by van de Cappelle survive, dated between 1652 and 1654. He derived motifs from Hendrick Avercamp, Isaac van Ostade and Esaias van de Velde, as well as being influenced by the late works of Aert van der Neer, who was twenty-three year his senior. Two upright winter landscapes, Frozen canal (Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede) and Winter landscape (private collection, England) are pure studies of nature, eliminating the genre element of skating figures.  

 

A handful of drawings and etchings by Jan van de Cappelle survive. He greatly influenced the marine painters of his generation, especially Hendrick Dubbels and Willem van de Velde the Younger. His winter landscapes were copied by Jan van Kessel and others.

 

The work of Jan van de Cappelle is represented in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; the Mauritshuis, The Hague; the Kunsthaus, Zurich; the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne; the National Gallery, London and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.