Lot 2042 Dα

With a later inscription in the lower left: Rembrandt f.

The basic elements of this rocky landscape are here outlined in hasty and confident strokes: The town with the stone bridge across a river on the right, the couple resting under a small tree on the left, the silhouette of a mill in the distance beneath the dark clouds that line the sky. The light of the sun breaks through the clouds behind a tall rocky outcrop, bathing the structures of the village in glaring bright light.
Tom van der Molen (Van der Molen, op. cit., p. 36) compares this work to two other landscapes by Govaert Flinck, a pupil of Rembrandt: One landscape in the Musée du Louvre dated 1637 (cf. illus. 1) and another work that was housed in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston until it was stolen. It is not only these works that testify to Flinck's activities as a landscape painter; contemporary inventories also list landscapes by this artist. Van der Molen notes that this pupil of Rembrandt may even have influenced his former teacher, as Rembrandt's landscapes are dated later.
Tom van der Molen describes this painting as follows, “The present work 'Landscape with a Stone Bridge' can also be attributed to this artist on stylistic grounds. The dramatic use of light links it more closely to the Boston work than to that in the Louvre, whilst the arrangement of the figures that populate the landscape is more similar in this later work. For this reason the piece should also be dated to around 1639.”