The Ascension of Elijah, David Colijns, 1627 – (David Colijns) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: David Colijns

Date: 1627

Size: 41 x 72 cm

Technique: Oil On Panel

Together with his Pharaoh’s Army Drowning in the Red Sea painted one year earlier,4 the present painting is David Colijns’s most animated composition. It depicts the prophet Elijah being taken up in a whirlwind to heaven in ‘a chariot of fire, and horses of fire’ (II Kings 2:11). Elijah’s successor Elisha rends his clothes into two pieces as he watches the scene, and Elijah’s mantle falls to earth for him to take on (II Kings 2:12-13). As more than one scholar has observed, Colijns’s painting of Elisha Mocked by the Little Children in a Dutch private collection (fig. a) is probably a pendant of the Rijksmuseum painting, or, possibly both paintings belonged to a series on the life of Elisha, from which the other works are no longer traceable.5 Both works are on panels of almost the same dimensions and both are signed and dated 1627. The dramatic chiaroscuro and the windswept landscape in the present work contrast with the calm daylight scene shown in the pendant. The large, centrally placed tree in both compositions is a common device employed by Colijns.6 Perspective has been created by the placement of coulisses one behind the other, and by the alternating bands of light and shadow. This landscape formula is derived from the work of such Flemish immigrants as Jacob Savery. Colijns’s feathery trees are also reminiscent of the latter artist. It is interesting to note in this context that quite a number of works by Jacob Savery are listed in the 1612 sale of the paintings owned by David Colijns’s father, Crispiaen.7 The caricatural features of Colijns’s figures, especially those of the children in the Utrecht painting, are highly reminiscent of David Vinckboons’s peasant types. While Colijns’s style as represented in The Ascension of Elijah has much in common with Savery and Vinckboons, it is difficult to discern the similarities with the work of Lastman and Pynas (presumably Jan) that Bredius saw.8 Another version of The Ascension of Elijah by Colijns with an upright oval format is known.9 That painting shows Elijah in his chariot in much the same way as in the Rijksmuseum picture, but concentrates more on the figures and less on the landscape. The oval version is not dated and it has not been possible to determine which work was executed first. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 50.