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Provenance: with Gallery Nijstad, Amsterdam, circa 1957.
Hertzberger family collection, Cadempino.

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Exhibited: Amsterdam, Kunsthandel Pieter de Boer, Nederland water/land, 1972, no. 36.

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Literature: R. de Bertier de Sauvigny, Jacob et Abel Grimmer, Brussels, 1991, p. 239, no. LXXXV.

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Notes: From time to time, Christie's may offer a lot which it owns in whole or in part. This is such a lot.
VAT rate of 5% is payable on hammer price and at 17.5% on the buyer's premium
This and the following four lots are from a series of months of the year of which Reine de Bertier de Sauvigny, in her catalogue raisonné (op. cit., p. 268, under no. 6) recorded another probable component, representing July and depicting the Parable of the Imprudent Rich Man (Luke 12, 16-21). The format is one that was evidently favoured by Grimmer, and was used by him in other examples, including perhaps most prominently the series of 1592 - now also dispersed - that Bürckardt suggested had been in the collection of the Archduke Ernst (1553-1595), brother of the Emperor Rudolph II and from 1594-5 Governor of the Spanish Netherlands (idem, pp. 197-8, no. V).

The compositions are adapted from a series of engravings of The Months of the Year by Adriaen Collaert, after designs by Hans Bol, published by Aegidius Sadeler in 1585 (or more correctly of the twelve signs of the zodiac matched to the months of the year: Emblemata Evangelica Ad XII Signa Coelesta Sive Totidem Ani Menses Accomodata). Collaert's engravings were of landscape format, and were used directly in that format by Grimmer in another series of the months (Montfaucon, Eglise de Notre-Dame; idem, pp. 190-7, no. III). It would seem that their adaptation into roundel format was Grimmer's own, following a format found frequently in Bol's work - perhaps even popularised by him - that he had used himself: for example the circular designs for the months in the series engraved by Collaert in circa 1580 (Hollstein 1326-37).