Roelant Savery - BOHEMIAN MOUNTAINSCAPE WITH A BRIDGE, TORRENT AND RESTING PEASANTS - image-1

Lot 1214 Dα

Roelant Savery - BOHEMIAN MOUNTAINSCAPE WITH A BRIDGE, TORRENT AND RESTING PEASANTS

Auction 995 - overview Cologne
12.05.2012, 00:00 - Old Masters and 19th Centuries Paintings
Estimate: 45.000 € - 60.000 €
Result: 73.200 € (incl. premium)

Roelant Savery

BOHEMIAN MOUNTAINSCAPE WITH A BRIDGE, TORRENT AND RESTING PEASANTS

Oil on copper. 17 x 21 cm.
R.Savery 1609.

The small painting by the 33-year-old painter was created during Savery's stay in Prague at the court of Rudolf II, where he was appointed court painter and where he remained until the Emperor's death in 1612. The Emperor appreciated Savery as a landscape painter and sent him to Tyrol, Friuli and Istria in order to depict these regions of his realm. The Bohemian and Tyrolean mountain regions with their tall pine trees, rough rock formations and wild creeks, the castles in the distance and peasants in the foreground, is a motif which repeatedly appeared in his paintings between 1606 and 1612. In Prague, artists from all European countries were working, especially Dutch and German. The capital was a melting pot of different art traditions that are apparent in this relatively early work by Savery, who was born in 1576. The influences of Flemish tradition and the proximity to the Brueghels are obvious, as is the influence of the so-called Donauschule (Danube School), the latter in particular by the blueish pines and the castle architecture at the left hand side of the painting. A peasant couple in Bohemian dress rest in the foreground. A similar staffage re-appears in Savery's painting "Bohemian Landscape with Tower Ruin" from 1606.
Similar precisely drawn and exquisite small-scale paintings are characteristic for the artists from the circle of Rudolf II, the collector of Kunstkammer objects.

Provenance

Georg Andreas Reimers collection, Sale Berlin 1842, no. 48. - 498. Lempertz auction, cologen, 25.4.1968, lot 117. - Weinmüller, Munich, 1970. - Auction Arne Brun Rasmussen, Kopenhagen 1980, lot 22. - J. van Haeften, London. Private collection, Germany.

Literature

T. Dacosta Kaufmann: L'École de Prague. La peinture à la cour de Rodolphe II., Paris 1985, p. 279. - K. J. Müllenmeister: Roelant Savery. Die Gemälde mit kritischem Oeuvrekatalog, Freren 1988, p. 205, no. 36.