Lot 1326 Dα

With a hand-written label to verso: "Eine Seeküste mit Schifferhütten und Volk (Neue Pinakothek No. 322) Schelfhout." The present work is registered with the Schelfhout-Archiv under the no. MO/35-1.

This work depicts a coastal landscape with fishing boats on land. Several groups of fishermen stand around and observe the catch. One fisherman and his son are shown playing with a model boat in a puddle. Fishermen's huts line the beach, and we see a rustic church on a hill in the distance. Alongside his popular winter scenes, Andreas Schelfhout also painted numerous coastal landscapes (cf. “View of Scheveningen”, Lempertz Auction 1020, 16.11.2013, lot 1525). He was inspired by the Dutch school of the 17th century Golden Age. From them he learnt how to line up his vessels to create the illusion of distance, how to use figures to enliven his scenes, and finally how to use light and cloudy skies to evoke the atmosphere of the coast. In his expertise, Laanstra dates the present work to around 1848 on the grounds of stylistic and motif comparisons. It was around this time that Andreas Schelfhout, already popular as a landscape painter in the Netherlands, also found international success. Schelfhout inspired a whole generation of artists, including Charles Leickert and Johann Jongkind, an important forerunner of Impressionism.