Lot 1037 Dα

This round painting dated 1635 is a product of the early phase of the important landscape artist Aert van der Neer, dating to the period shortly after he settled in Amsterdam. Neer painted his first landscapes in 1633, and this piece is among his earliest dated works. The work uses the roundel format, popular in Netherlandish landscape painting of the time, to lead the beholder's gaze into an elegant composition with travellers in a wooded river landscape.
In the foreground we see a meadow with a tree stump, populated by a small flock of ducks. The left half of the image is dominated by a group of mighty trees reaching to the top of the image. A path leads from the meadow to the bridge in the mid ground, passing a group of travellers on the right towards a cottage surrounded by trees. The artist skilfully leads the viewer from foreground to background in a broad arc, enlivening and bringing order to the composition through the parallel arrangement of light and dark areas. The depiction of strong wind bending the branches of the trees lends the depiction additional atmosphere.
The round format was popular with landscape artists of the time, such as Esaias van de Velde and Jan van Goyen, who were among the great modernisers of Netherlandish landscape painting. The elegant and decorative quality of this format, as well that of the oval, was also used by Aert van der Neer in many of his early landscapes (cf. for example: Schulz, op. cit., no. 583, 584, 1258, 1260).