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PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTOR, OHIO

DUTCH, 1803-1862
LANDSCAPE WITH CASTLE

measurements
25 1/2 by 32 1/2 in.

alternate measurements
64.8 by 82.6 cm

signed B. C. Koekkoek f. and dated 1855 (lower left)

oil on canvas

PROVENANCE

Private American Collection (by the 1930s)
Thence by descent to the present owner

NOTE

Barend Cornelis Koekkoek came to be known during his lifetime as the "Prince of Landscape Painting" and remains the most important landscape painter of Dutch Romanticism. The recipient of endless awards and decorations, he counted among his clients King Friedrich-Wilhelm IV of Prussia, Tsar Alexander II, and King Willem II of the Netherlands.

The eldest son of the marine painter Johannes Hermanus Koekkoek, in 1817 he enrolled at the Drawing Academy of Middleburg. On moving to Amsterdam in 1822, he studied for four years at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten, by the end of which he had determined to become a landscape painter. With that in mind, in 1834 he moved to Cleves where he found his ideal subject matter in the woods and Rhine landscape that had appealed to earlier Dutch painters for centuries.

By 1841, Koekkoek had earned sufficient respect from his fellow artists that he decided to publish a lesson book for students, "Herinneringen en Medeldeelingen van eenen Landschapsschilder" which took the form of a leisurely journey along the Rhine, a setting which attracted the reader to various qualities of nature and landscape. That same year he founded a drawing academy in Cleves. He advised his students to study nature closely, to observe the qualities of light at dawn and at sunset and the development of storms. He also guided his students in the examination of Dutch seventeenth century masters.

Koekkoek's own paintings reveal a careful study and synthesis of Dutch seventeenth century painters. The majestic castle in the present work, dramatically placed and lit, recalls the paintings of Jacob van Ruisdael, while the expertly rendered trees remind the viewer of Meyndert Hobbema. The golden light and the inclusion of travelers in the foreground suggests Koekkoek also admired the Dutch Italianate painters of the seventeenth century, collectively known as the Bamboccianti, especially Pieter van Laer and Jan Both.

Koekkoek imagined his pictures as the result of an ideal combination of observation and artifice. He studied art and nature with equal acuity, creating beautiful landscape paintings that celebrated the greatness of Creation.