Allart van Everdingen (Alkmaar 1621 – 1675 Amsterdam)

A Waterfall in Norway

signed lower right: A V Everdingen
oil on canvas
30 x 26 ⅜ inches (76 x 67 cm.)

Provenance:
M. Tissier, beginning of the 19th Century; Coll. Hendrick Adolf Steengracht van Duivenvoorde, The Hague (acc. To Stengracht family archives); his sale, Petit, Paris, June 9, 1913, no. 21, repr. (to Georges); Private Collection, France; art market, New York; Private Collection, New York.

Literature:
G. Lafenestre and E. Richtenberger, La Peinture en Europe, La Hollande, n.d., [1897],
p. 155; O. Granberg, Allart van Everdingen och hans “Norska” landskap, 1902, p. 54, no. 29; A.  Wurzbach, Niederlandisches Kunstler-Lexikon, I, Vienna/Leipzig 1906, p. 498; J. Rosenberg, Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin, 1928, p. 43, fig. 97; A. Davies, 1978 (reprint of 1973 Ph. D. dissertation, Harvard University), pp. 158-159; p 333, no 61, fig. 165; A. Davies, Allart van Everdingen. First Painter of Scandinavian Landscape, 2001, repr. on cover, plate I and 81.

Baptized on June 18, 1621 in Alkmaar, Allart van Everdingen was the son of a notary and brother of the history painter Ceasar van Everdingen.  According to Houbraken, Allart was a pupil of Roelandt Savery in Utrecht and Pieter de Molijn in Haarlem.  His earliest known dated painting is from 1640.  In 1644 he executed a series of drawings of the southern coast of Norway, probably visiting Risor and Langesund, and the area around Götenborg, Sweden.  Everdingen’s earliest treatment of the waterfall is in Mountain Landscape with Waterfall and Huts of 1646 (sale, Bukowski’s, Stolkholm, 1981; present whereabouts unknown).

Everdingen returned to the Netherlands by early 1645 and became a member of the Reformed Church in Haarlem; in the following year he joined the city’s guild.  In 1648 he and Caesar joined the Civic Guard of St. George.  In 1652 Allart moved to Amsterdam and became a citizen in 1657.  Drawings, etchings, and a painting by Everdingen of Montjardin Castle and other motifs in and around Spa and in the Southern Netherlands suggest an otherwise unrecorded visit to the Ardennes.  Everdingen died at the age of fifty-four, and was buried in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam on November 8, 1675.

According to Alice Davies, who wrote the monograph on Allard van Everdingen, and examined our picture, it is a “beautiful painting” by van Everdingen and dates from the “mid to late [sixteen] fifties.”1.