Lot 15: SALOMON VAN RUYSDAEL

THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR NAARDEN 1600/3 - 1670 HAARLEM A VIEW OF THE VALKHOF AT NIJMEGEN SEEN FROM THE WEST, WITH A FERRY CROSSING THE RIVER WAAL signed in monogram and dated on the ferry lower centre: SvR. 1647 oil on oak panel 64.5 by 89.4 cm.; 25 3/8 by 35 in.

London, Agnew’s, Spring Exhibition, 1968, no. 20; London, Agnew’s, Paintings by Old Masters, 4 June – 5 July 1974, no. 17, reproduced in colour.

W. Stechow, Salomon van Ruysdael, eine Entführung in seine Kunst, Berlin 1938, p. 116, no. 403; W. Stechow, Salomon van Ruysdael, revised ed., Berlin 1975, p. 121, no. 349A.

Gustave Rothan (1822-1890); His deceased sale, Paris, Féral, Chevallier, 29-31 May 1890, lot 97 (“important et beau tableau d’une parfait conservation”), for 7,500 Francs to Allain; With Agnew’s, London, 1946; R.P. Silcock, Preston, Lancashire; With Agnew’s, London by whom sold to The Hon. Mrs Derek Lawson; Thence by descent; With Agnew’s, London, from whom acquired by the present owner in 1977.

This is a superb example of Salomon van Ruysdael’s early maturity. Painted one year before the Treaty of Münster gave the Dutch Republic an enduring peace in which to enjoy its mounting prosperity, this painting presents a boundlessly optimistic view of a settled world that was at ease with itself. Like his near contemporary Jan van Goyen, Salomon van Ruysdael’s landscapes present a unified view of land, water and sky, often as here with a town. Ruysdael’s art had, like Van Goyen’s, evolved through stages of tonal landscape painting with different strictly muted colours predominating, but by the late 1640s they were travelling in different directions: Van Goyen towards a more textural and expressive tonality in his last works; Ruysdael towards a more settled style that was to endure for several decades, in which stronger light animates his scenes allowing a much greater range of colours. Travelling from the North Sea up the river Waal, one of the two principal branches of the Rhine, Nijmegen was the second large city to be reached after Dordrecht, and more importantly, it is set on the very first hill that the traveller would have encountered. Consequently, in the art of Salomon van Ruysdael as in that of Van Goyen and other Dutch landscape painters, it would have had a considerable visual impact on a Dutch public that was unfamiliar with any hill larger than a sand dune. Moreover the site of the medieval Valkhof, the fortress built on Roman foundations that dominates the city, was and indeed still is dramatic, towering over a bend in the river. Both Ruysdael and Van Goyen painted it on several occasions, imbuing it with an emblematic status on a par with Salomon van Ruysdael’s nephew Jacob van Ruisdael’s views of Bentheim, painted in the following decade.1 The view is from on or near the north bank of the Waal looking upriver to the east. The Valkhof not only dominates the composition, its impressive grandeur rising above two rings of fortified walls and culminating with its towering keep, but it was also of considerable patriotic resonance in Ruysdael’s day. The castle and the fortified city of Nijmegen control the river Waal, and thus one of the two principal trade routes from The Netherlands into Germany, and the Valkhof itself had been built by the Emperor Charlemagne. Moreover, the site had much older significance for the newly formed Dutch Republic, because it was the stronghold from which, as recounted by the Roman historian Tacitus, Gaius Julius Civilis, leader of the Batavians, launched a successful revolt against the Roman Empire in 69 AD.2 The Batavians were viewed by the nascent Dutch Republic as their ancestral forebears, who like the Dutch had declared independence from Imperial hegemony. Dutch writers such as Justus Lipsius and Hugo Grotius fashioned the Batavian revolt into a contemporary patriotic narrative which was widely disseminated, and thus readily appreciated by Ruysdael’s public.3 In Ruysdael’s painting the creamy sky descending to the horizon, always painted wet-in-wet with paint that looks as if it still has not dried, is usually facing west, and denotes afternoon, but the scene here is in the morning, with clouds moving up from the south. At ground level there is a light breeze from the east, not strong enough to stir the surface of the water beyond ripples, and light enough to allow sound to travel across the water, for example from the trumpeter in the bow of the cattle-ferry in the foreground. Ruysdael understands how water that does not reflect skylight, as in the foreground, is a deep steely grey, which feels dense and adds solidity to the immediate foreground. Ruysdael’s masterfully tranquil scene is composed with a series of sloping curves, which give it a depth and sense of volume that conveys permanence. The linear structure of the clouds run from the distant lower right to the nearer upper left of the picture plane, while the land recedes from the upper right where it is nearest the viewer to the horizon to the left. The clouds, being less solid than the land, have their rhythm gently repeated for emphasis in the curving slope of the rowing boat loaded with fishing creels in the lower left corner. The balance and order of the composition, combined with its gentle cadences of light and subtle movement, and Ruysdael’s delicious virtuoso handling of the brush combine to create one of the artist’s most satisfying pictures, in which order and nature are implicit. PROVENANCE Gustave Rothan was a French diplomat and political historian. He was born in Strasbourg in 1822 and died in Pallanza in Piemonte in 1890. He occupied numerous French consular posts in the course of his diplomatic career, in the pursuance of which he was posted to Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Hamburg. Subsequently he was appointed Secretary of the French embassies in Berlin and Constantinople, and Minister to the King of Italy in Florence. Following his retirement from the diplomatic service in 1871, he published until the year before his death, mostly on relations between France and Prussia and German states, and the Franco-Prussian War, and relations between France and Italy. His wife also came from an Upper Rhine family. Their only daughter married Baron de Coubertin, celebrated as the man who revived the ancient Olympic Games in the modern era. R.P. Silcock, from an old Preston family, formed a significant collection of Dutch Old Masters in the immediate post-war era, with a preference for Dutch landscape painting, buying from several London galleries including Agnew’s and Edward Speelman, both of whom re-acquired paintings from him or his descendants in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These include a panoramic landscape by Philips Koninck now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, two wooded landscapes by Jacob van Ruisdael acquired through Agnew’s from the Executors of Lionel de Rothschild, a Jan Steen Wedding Party now in the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. He also collected British paintings, and owned a Constable View of Yarmouth, also acquired from and sold back to Agnew’s. His tastes must have been formed swiftly in the second half of the 1940s, because a Pre-Raphaelite work by Millais, L’Enfant du Regiment (now in The Mellon Centre, Yale), which he acquired from Agnew’s in 1946, was sold back to them two years later. 1. Three other views of the Valkhof are known by Ruysdael: a work of 1648 in the M.H. de Young Museum in San Francisco, a painting indistinctly dated 165.. offered in these Rooms, 6 December 1969, lot 74, and an undated painting sold New York, Sotheby’s, 14 January 1988, lot 33. Jan van Goyen, whose work is more often topographical, painted it on a number of occasions. Aelbert Cuyp painted several views of the Valkhof based on drawings made during a trip there in 1652, including a pair of paintings, one showing the Valkhof from the north-west - that is to say from a point to the left of the present work - and the other from the south bank of the Waal looking west; see A. Chong, in AK. Wheelock Jr. (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, exhibition catalogue, Washington 2001, pp. 158-161, nos. 33 & 34, both reproduced). 2. This is not certain, although Nijmegen, known as Noviomagus (from which its modern name derives), was where the Romans stationed a legion following the humiliating defeat that they had inflicted on the Batavians. 3. Lipsius revised his 1588 edition of Tacitus to include a call to arms, and Grotius in 1610 freely interpreted the story of Claudius Civilis in contemporary terms in order to establish ancient precedents for the governments of the new Dutch Republic. He also popularized the notion that ancient Batavia included all the territory of the Seven United Dutch Province; this is significant because Nijmegen was just within the eastern border (as it is just within the modern border of The Netherlands).