Artist: Aert Van Der Neer
Date: 1875
Size: 70 x 104 cm
Technique: Oil On Canvas
In the past this painting was attributed to Aert van der Neer, probably because it is monogrammed ‘AV’. However, there is only a very general, thematic relationship to the work of the seventeenth-century artist, and stylistically it is very far removed indeed. The landscape is a collection of more or less rustic elements: a lake near a village and a farmhouse. A few small sailing vessels are trying to make headway on the smooth water, and a rowing boat with four men in it is approaching the shore. On the far right is a ruin that bears some resemblance to those found in late eighteenth-century parks like the Valkhof in Nijmegen. It is remarkable how ill-defined the objects are; even a prominent motif like the church is just a large dark undifferentiated mass. The composition and subject display similarities to the work of Jacobus Theodorus Abels (1803-1866), who was inspired by Van der Neer to specialize in evening landscapes.9 One distinctive feature of his oeuvre is the cool, bright patch of sky in the centre of the scene surrounded by heavy, menacing clouds that take up most of the space, as can be seen in his River Landscape by Moonlight.10 Standing out sharply against the background of a clear sky in that painting is a church tower, and in the dark foreground there are men in a rowing boat on a calm stretch of water. That or a similar picture probably provided the inspiration for the one in the Rijksmuseum, which is too weak to be attributed to Abels himself. It may well be by a contemporary of his and date from the third quarter of the nineteenth century, at a time when the romantic subject of a landscape by moonlight was extremely popular.11 Erlend de Groot, 2022 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
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