Wooded Landscape with Hunter/Winter Landscape, Aert van der Neer, c. 1642 - 1643 – (Aert Van Der Neer) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Aert Van Der Neer

Date: 1643

Size: 37 x 59 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

Since the nineteenth century this Wooded Landscape with Hunter has been rated as one of the most important early paintings by Aert van der Neer.10 The scene, as it appeared at the time, was of a wood and a pond with a view through the trees to a church, and with a hunter in the foreground (fig. a). Bachmann dated it around 1642,11 and compared it to Pond in Front of a Village, which was thought to come from the same year but which is now known to have been executed after 1645.12 That was also one of the few of the artist’s compositions to include a hunter.13 The problematic aspects of the present picture, such as the clumsy rendering of the hunter, the lack of a target for him and the overpainting in the sky and trees on the left, were not immediately noticed and the autograph nature of the work was never doubted, nor did the strip 6.3 cm high that had clearly been added to the top of the panel raise questions.14 It is no longer possible to reconstruct precisely how, why and when reservations began to be expressed about large areas of the work.15 As the 1976 collection catalogue shows the painting without the extension at the top, the extra strip had probably been detached by then.16 It had certainly been removed by 1978, when X-rays were taken.17 In 1988-92 part of the overpainting of the sky and the trees on the left, which originally extended onto the added strip, was removed. Photographs taken at the time show that the pond had now become transparent to such an extent that the silhouettes of small figures underneath it must have been visible to the naked eye (fig. b). The cleaning had several consequences. On the one hand it became clear that most of the left-hand part of the picture did not match Van der Neer’s initial design. The tree in the foreground was previously shorter and another on the left much taller, they had no leaves, and silhouettes of skaters rather than the hunter were included. On the other hand, the wood of the panel was now revealed. In other words, a winter landscape had been discovered, but there was so little of it left that it could not possibly serve as the basis for a new scene. An attempt was made to reverse the cleaning but was eventually abandoned. The one thing that is certain is that the panel was originally used for a winter landscape. The left half of the composition consisted of a stretch of frozen water surrounded by a strip of land, woods and the houses of a village. A simple church could be seen between the bare trunks of the trees in the left background. On the ice were skaters, some of them with sledges, and a few people playing kolf. The scale of the figures and their activities closely resemble those in other winter landscape by Van der Neer from the period 1642-43.18 It is very possible that the church between the trees on the right was part of the initial design,19 as quite a few changes were made to it. The trees on the right, or at least some of them, certainly were originally planned. It seems likely that Van der Neer left the picture unfinished and decided at an early stage to use the panel for another scene. Regardless of the fact whether Van der Neer himself had a hand in the compositional adaptations or another artist, the initial design was changed before 1833, when Adriaen van der Hoop bought the picture as a ‘Landscape by A. van der Neer’.20 The sheet of frozen water became a pond in a wood, the skaters were overpainted, the trees had sprouted leaves, and the buildings around the ice were covered with trees. Only the small house in the centre of the scene was spared, although it was tucked away a bit by making the stump of the dead tree in the foreground taller. Erlend de Groot, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements