Poppy Harvey-Jones
Head of Sale
Lot 43TP
Jan Gerritsz.van Bronckhorst(Utrecht circa 1603-1662 Amsterdam)Two women at a stone ledge with a boy playing a flute
8 December 2016, 14:00 GMT
London, New Bond Street£80,000 - £120,000
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Jan Gerritsz.van Bronckhorst (Utrecht circa 1603-1662 Amsterdam)
Two women at a stone ledge with a boy playing a flute
oil on canvas
99.6 x 141.6cm (39 3/16 x 55 3/4in).
oil on canvas
99.6 x 141.6cm (39 3/16 x 55 3/4in).
Footnotes
Provenance
Purchased by the present owner's father in the 1970s
Typical of Bronckhorst's concert groups, the present work is one of several of this subject which generally date to the 1640s. Other examples of pictures from this group and date can be found at the Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum, Brunswick, the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, and The Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. All of these works use the same illusionistic device of placing the figures either on or behind a stone balcony or parapet suggesting that they were intended to be seen di sotto in sù.
A drawing in the collection of the University of Göttingen clearly provides the starting point for the present Two women at a stone ledge with a boy playing a flute (see fig. 1). The artist, however, has made several changes to the composition such as to the background figures and the seated woman's headdress. A further version, also based on the Göttingen drawing, was with Francesco Pospisil, Venice, in the 1950s (121 x 133cm.; see B. Nicolson ed. L Vertova, Caravaggism in Europe, 2nd edition, Milan, 1989, p.69, ill. fig. 1385) but which differs from the present work in the background figures. Bronckhorst is known to have repeated a composition on at least one other occasion with the two works depicting A Merry Company with a Violinist at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht and the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg (inv. no. 3303).
Initially trained as a glass painter, the debt to Gerrit van Honthorst and other Utrecht caravaggisti, such as Jan van Bijlert, is clearly evident in Bronckhorst's work. Indeed, Sandrart wrote that he regularly visited Honthorst's studio in the mid 1620s. Bronckhorst also made a trip to Paris at this time where he is known to have studied works by Rubens and Gentileschi. Whilst he was very much part of the group of painters known as the Utrecht caravaggisti in terms of his choice of subject matter, the bright palette and jovial atmosphere of his works reveal that the influence of Caravaggio's work was only part of his artistic make-up.
