Lot 1529 Dα

With a hand-written and signed label by B. C. Koekkoek with the artist's seal and a confirmation that it was painted in 1858 to the back of the panel.
Barend Cornelis Koekkoek moved to Cleves in the Lower Rhine Region in 1834. He was one of the leading Romantic landscape painters of his era. The colour palette, composition, and style of this work are typical of the artist's later phase. It depicts a small stream running through a narrow, wooded valley. The gentle scene is populated by a handful of rustic figures winding their way along a path crossing the babbling brook.
Friedrich Gorissen, author of Koekkoek's catalogue raisonné, had never seen the work in person or in reproductions, which led him to his decision to include it among a group of works referred to as “undated landscapes”. He cites an auction catalogue entry from 1891 listing a work with dimensions and a description that correspond so closely to the present panel that it can only be one and the same, thus allowing us to trace the work's provenance back to 1891.
We would like to thank Drs Guido de Werd for his kind support in cataloguing this work. He confirmed Koekkoek's authorship upon first-hand examination of the work and will be including it in the updated version of the catalogue raisonné under the number 58/30.