Lot 196: HENDRICK CORNELISZ. VROOM HAARLEM CIRCA 1563 - 1640

PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE COLLECTION

A NORTH SEA BEACH SCENE, WITH FISHING PINKS COMING ASHORE AND LARGER VESSELS OFFSHORE

measurements note
19.6 by 40 cm.; 7 3/4 by 15 3/4 in.

signed on a piece of driftwood lower centre: VROOM

oil on oak panel

PROVENANCE

Sir Bruce Ingram, O.B.E., M.C., bears his collector's mark on a piece of paper affixed to the reverse;
His (deceased) sale, London, Sotheby's, 11 March 1964, lot 50, for £850 to the present owner.

NOTE

Hendrick Vroom was the great pioneer of Dutch marine painting, and a great innovator. Most of his beach scenes are relatively late works, dating from the 1620s and 30s, but there seems to be little development in style during this period. The present example is similar in style and handling to three similar views of the Beach at Scheveningen with Fishing Pinks coming Ashore, one dated 1623, one 1628 and the third 1635[1]. The distant church in the present view is probably also intended to be that of Scheveningen. To judge from the horizon line, it was probably painted before 1630.

Sir Bruce Ingram had a superb collection of, among other treasures, marine paintings and drawings, including a very large group of drawings by Willem van de Velde the Elder and Younger bequeathed to the the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich, and a group of Dutch drawings including sheets by Hendrick Vroom, bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge in 1963.

[1] The first was with P. de Boer in 1964 and the third is in a Dutch private collection; for these see M. Russell, Visions of the Sea. Hendrick C. Vroom and the Origins of Dutch Marine Painting, Leiden 1983, p. 155, reproduced p. 157, figs 138 a & b. The second picture, dated 1628, was offered at Christie's in London, 13 December 1991, lot 24.