Gerrit Battem

Private Collection, The Netherlands

Gerrit Battem came from a family of landscape painters. His uncles were Philips Koninck (1619-1688) and Abraham Furnerius (1628-1654), and Jacob de Villeers (1616-1667), a painter of mountainous panoramas, was his step-father. Furnerius, a pupil of Rembrandt who, like Battem, was born and died in Rotterdam, is thought to have been his teacher, but nevertheless, Koninck's work was also highly influential. 

Although Gerrit Battem produced about forty oil paintings, his finest works are highly finished gouaches, nearly sixty of which are landscapes, or outdoor scenes such as this. None bears a date, and as the scenes are painted in an eclectic style which changed little over the course of Battem's career, only a broad chronology has been established. Hans Verbeek, however, who studied the artist in depth, believed the landscapes to date from 1665-1684, placing the majority in the 1670s. 

A lively scene of a village festival of the type seen here is unusual in Battem's work.