Nicolaes Berchem

Willem van der Lely (1698-1772), Burgomaster of Delft;

His estate sale, Amsterdam, Van der Schley, 14 December 1772, lot 10;

Mme. Jean Etienne Fiseau (née Marie Anne Massé, d. 1790), Amsterdam;

Her estate sale, Amsterdam, Van der Schley and Roos, 30 August 1797, lot 8;

Where acquired by Jan Yver (1747-1814), for 351 fl.;

Wiggers van Kerchem Collection, late 19th century (as indicated by a wax seal on the panel's verso);

With Rafael Valls Ltd., London, 2004;

With Johnny van Haeften, London;

Anonymous sale, New York, Sotheby's, 28 January 2005, lot 339;

Where acquired by the present collector.

C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches verzeichnis der werke des hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, vol. IX, Esslingen and Paris 1926, p. 226, cat. no. 642.

This signed luminous pastoral landscape exemplifies the qualities that secured Nicolaes Berchem's place as one of the most admired Italianate landscape painters of the seventeenth century. Born in Haarlem and initially trained by his father, the renowned still-life painter Pieter Claesz, Berchem’s early formation shaped his approach to pictorial refinement and surface detail. Although Italianate in spirit, his earliest works predate his own journey south and instead reflect the influence of Netherlandish painters who had travelled to Italy, most notably Jan Both and Jan Asselijn. A sojourn in Italy, likely between 1653 and 1656, refined this idiom, lending greater assurance to his handling of light and space.

Set within a gently receding valley framed by rocky outcrops and softly silhouetted trees, the composition unfolds from a shaded foreground—where a shepherd and shepherdess rest beside their cattle and sheep—into a sunlit distance animated by winding paths, grazing animals, and a pale, expansive sky. The warm, golden tonality, delicate modulation of light, and careful integration of figures and landscape typify Berchem’s synthesis of northern technique and imagined southern terrain, a formula that proved enormously popular with contemporary collectors, as underscored by the wide dissemination of his compositions through prints in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.