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Artist or Maker: Aelbert Cuyp (Dordrecht 1620-1691)

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Provenance: Miss M. Hoofman; Engesmet, Haarlem, 9 June 1846, lot 53 or 54.
G. Leembruggen Jzn.; C.F. Roos et al., Amsterdam, 5-10 March 1866, lot 154 (Aelbert Cuyp, L'entrée d'une forêt. A la pierre noire et au bistre. Haut 19 cent. Larg. 30 cent. Coll. Hoofman).

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Exhibited: Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, Aelbert Cuyp en zijn familie, 1977-1978, no. 50.

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Notes: This drawing can be dated to the early 1640s, and can be compared stylistically with a drawing of A path at the edge of a wood with two oak trees now in the British Museum, which dates from the same period (A.K. Wheelock, ed., Aelbert Cuyp, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, and elsewhere, 2002, no. 53). Both drawings show the same tight use of dense black chalk over much lighter underdrawing. Indeed the two drawings also share similar provenance having been neighbouring lots in the Hoofman and Leembruggen sales.
The present drawing is particularly notable in that it places the pair of trees at the front centre of the composition, in distinction to Cuyp's more usual technique of leading the eye deeper into the landscape as found, for example, in the British Museum drawing. The juxtaposition of a the bare dying tree next to a luxuriously verdant one may indeed have symbolic importance as for example in the compositionally similar drawing of Two oak trees in an extensive landscape by Jacob Ruisdael sold in these Rooms, 24 January 2001, lot 162.
Franz Koenigs love for drawings of this type is demonstrated by the presence of an extremely similar landscape drawing by Cuyp, of the same date, in his First Collection, now in the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam (Dordrecht, op, cit., no. 49).