Lot 2158 Dα

Lot 2157 and 2158 will first be called individually in the auction and then again together.

Andreas Schelfhout spent his entire life in The Hague. However, he often found inspiration for his landscapes in the dunes near Haarlem. He also painted broad river panoramas from an elevated viewpoint in Gelderland. There are numerous parallels in the work of his equally famous compatriot and colleague Barend Cornelis Koekkoek (1803-1862). Both artists were already considered the two most important landscape painters in the Netherlands during their lifetime. They shared the same preferences when it came to choice of subject. Both were exceptionally good painters of river landscapes and winter scenes. They obviously looked for landscapes with identical characteristics. For summer landscapes, they chose an elevated vantage point, focusing on distant towns along meandering rivers.

Given the close relationship between the two artists' works, it is not surprising that the present landscape was long thought to be a work by Koekkoek. The picture still had a false signature from B. C. Koekkoek when it was sold at Christie's Amsterdam in 1999. Both artists chose the flat landscape of Holland for their winter pictures, with an expansive sky over a low horizon. However, the staffage and motifs included in the present painting are typical of Schelfhout. While Koekkoek never missed an opportunity to place a lush tree in the foreground to serve as a repoussoir, the role of trees in Schelfhout's summer landscapes in the middle and later stages of his career was less important. Only shrubs are shown growing in the foreground of the present work; all the larger trees are pushed back and can only be seen in the distance. Schelfhout often incorporated felled tree trunks, as can be seen in the lower left foreground. Koekkoek, in his textbook on landscape painting, disapproved of what he called this "defacement of nature" and considered it unsuitable for landscape painting (see: B. C. Koekkoek: Herinneringen en Mededeelingen van een Landschapschilds, Kleve, 1841, pp. 187-188 ).