Gerrit Berckheyde (1638 – Haarlem – 1698)

Italianate Landscape

signed lower center: g. berck. Heyde.
oil on panel
16 ½ x 22 ⅜ inches (42 x 57 cm.)

Provenance:
Private Collection, United States;
with Johnny van Haeften, Ltd., March 2006.

General Literature:
Christopher Brown, Dutch Landscape: The Early Years in Haarlem and Amsterdam, 1590 – 1650, exh. cat. National Gallery, London, 1986.
Walter Liedtke, “Pride in Perspective: The Dutch Townscape,” in Connoisseur, CC (1979), April, p. 296, pp. 264-73, fig. 6
Cynthia Lawrence, Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde, Doornspijk, 1991.

Gerrit Adriaensz.  Berckheyde was the leading townscape painter of Haarlem in the same period that his close contemporary, Jan van der Heyden (1637-1712) was working in nearby Amsterdam.  Berckheyde joined the painters’ guild in Haarlem at the age of twenty-two in 1660, when Pieter Saenredam was already a long-standing and prominent member who had only five years to live.  Job Berckheyde (1630-1693) was probably his brother’s teacher.¹ Both brothers held offices in the painters’ guild during the 1680’s and 1690’s.  Job died in 1693 and, five years later, in his sixtieth year, Gerrit drowned in the Brouwersvaart, while taking a shortcut through a private garden after leaving a tavern.  He was buried in the nave of the St. Janskerk on 14 June 1698.

The Berckheyde brothers traveled to Cologne and Heidelberg in the late 1650s and gained employment with the Elector Palatine.  Most of Gerrit’s paintings represented exterior views of important sites in Haarlem and Amsterdam.  Numerous pictures survive showing the Market Place in Haarlem, the Town Hall in Amsterdam, the magnificent new canal houses in the same city, and other subjects which in their day were not only interesting architecturally but were also rich in social and historical significance.  One might speculate that Berckheyde introduced the specter of national pride with his views of government buildings at The Hague (the Binnehof, Buitenhof, etc) some even representing members of the House of Orange on horseback.

Berckheyde’s Dutch cityscapes are topographically accurate, while his landscapes are largely imaginative and ultimately composites of various drawings and studies.  His Italianate landscapes, with their crumbling monuments and southern vistas, are surely imaginary, as he never visited Italy. 
This pastoral scene suggests the influence of the second generation of Italianate landscape painters active in Haarlem.²  Berckheyde’s bucolic scenes, of which the present painting is a typical example, reflect the widespread popularity of pastoral imagery in Dutch seventeenth-century art. His bright colors and evocative atmospheric effects may have their sources in similar works by Nicholaes Berchem, Jan Both, Jan Weenix, or other Italianates.  It could also show the influence of other Dutch artists such as Albert Cuyp, who famously painted similar pastoral scenes, many including cattle, as seen in the present painting. 

In our Italianate Landscape, two figures are seated in the sunlit foreground, gazing in the direction of the young woman walking up the path.  Berckheyde creates dramatic effects with his expert rendition of color and shadow.  The two seated figures, a woman and a young boy, are dressed in vibrant shades of red, yellow, and blue, contrasting with the warm brown of the cow lying behind them.  The boy leans against a mule saddle.  The young woman, presumably a traveler due to her large bag and jug for carrying water, wears a dark costume, also contrasting with the browns and whites of the cattle behind her.  She wears a fur cap and a shirt with a ruffled collar, likely identifying her as a farm woman from Vriesland.  Berckheyde also revels in the long shadows cast by the setting sun, creating an alteration of sunlight and shadow that continues throughout the scene.

¹See Lawrence, 1991, Chapter 1 for biographies of both artists.

²Lawrence, op. cit., p. 86.