Catalogue entry no. 93 by William W. Robinson:
Simon de Vlieger, like many Dutch artists, led a peripatetic life. He was probably born in Rotterdam and lived there until he was about thirty-four years old, but he later resided in Delft (1634–38), Amsterdam (1638–48), and Weesp (1649–53). Best known for his seascapes, especially pictures of shipping on calm waters that inspired the majestic “parade marines” of Jan van de Cappelle and Willem van de Velde the Younger, De Vlieger was also an outstanding landscape painter and innovative printmaker. His drawings address a far more diverse range of subjects than his paintings: in addition to beaches and marines, they represent animals, ruins, townscapes, river views, forests, villages, farms, and figural compositions, including a few historical scenes. Van de Cappelle, the seascape painter who emulated De Vlieger’s work, owned more than 1,300 of his sketches and studies, many of which have been lost or remain unidentified.
Landscape with Trees by a River belongs to the most numerous and familiar group of De Vlieger’s surviving drawings, which consists of woodland scenes with towering trees, isolated roads, and quiet pools and streams. Broadly executed with chalk and wash on blue or white paper, these works probably date from the later 1640s and early 1650s. Some, including the Harvard sheet, were signed and presumably intended for sale. De Vlieger worked on sheets of various formats, but many are surprisingly large, compared to finished landscapes by draftsmen such as Jan van Goyen or Pieter de Molijn (1965.204, 2011.514). The grandly structured compositions and monumentally scaled trees of De Vlieger’s drawings bear comparison with his etchings and rare paintings of forest scenes.
An old annotation on the verso of the sheet, Schellinx f. — “Schellinx f[ecit],” i.e., made it—appears to be an erroneous attribution to the landscapist Willem Schellinks (1627–1678) or his brother, Daniel (1627–1701). If so, the author of the inscription overlooked De Vlieger’s autograph monogram on the recto. However, it is possible that the person who annotated the sheet mistook an early owner of the drawing for its draftsman. In a will of 1664, Daniel Schellinks and his wife recorded their intention to bequeath to Willem Schellinks “a book with drawings by the late Simon de Vlieger.” Perhaps the Harvard landscape belonged to that album, and a later collector was misled by some documentation of its provenance, now lost, into thinking that “Schellinx” was the artist.
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