Catalogue entry no. 60b by William W. Robinson:
The painter, draftsman, and etcher Isaac de Moucheron specialized in Italian views, Arcadian landscapes, and idealized gardens and parks with prominent classicizing buildings, a type he popularized. From about 1695 to 1697 De Moucheron visited Italy, where he studied the works of the view painter Caspar van Wittel, as well as those of Gaspard Dughet and other landscapists working in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. After returning to the Netherlands, he established his career as a painter of idyllic landscapes on large canvases that were set into the walls of patrician Amsterdam houses. Writing shortly after the artist’s death, the biographer Johan van Gool attested that De Moucheron’s “absolutely exquisite (overheerlyke) drawings and watercolors are as esteemed and sought after as his paintings and pursued enthusiastically by connoisseurs.” More than four hundred drawings and watercolors, representing topographical views, Italianate landscapes, woodlands, and park landscapes, are included in the catalogue raisonné of his work by Nina Wedde.
These three drawings (2011.518, 2013.42, 2004.93) belong to a set of four by De Moucheron that remained together from the first half of the eighteenth century, when they belonged to Johan Pieter van den Brande in Middelburg, until they were dispersed at auction in 1972. The fourth is in private hands in Boston (Fig. 1). Executed in the same media and technique, the compositions are nearly uniform in size, identically signed in the lower margins, and inscribed on the versos with the numeral 10, although the significance of that number is not clear. The watermarks in two of the sheets are nearly identical, so they may have been produced on a twin mold. Like many drawings from the Van den Brande collection, all four are in pristine condition, having remained in portfolios for 250 years. Never remounted, the sheets retain their ample margins and the original owner’s black border lines. The form of the signature indicates a date at the outset of De Moucheron’s career. Variants of Man Leading a Horse by a Pond in a Stormy, Wooded Landscape (2011.518) and Wooded Landscape with Bathers (2013.42), with the compositions reversed and more vertical in format than the Harvard drawings, appeared in an Amsterdam auction in 1988. The two versions are identical in size and bear successive numbers on their versos, suggesting the works have long been associated as a pair.
The four drawings, which were together in the Van den Brande collection during the artist’s lifetime and are unmistakably related in format, style, media, and technique, probably constitute a series. As such, they might or might not share a unifying iconography. De Moucheron evoked different weather conditions in each composition: The bare foreground trees, turbulent sky, and horseman’s windblown coat in Man Leading a Horse by a Pond in a Stormy, Wooded Landscape (2011.518) contrast with the fair-weather clouds, lush vegetation, and nude figures in Wooded Landscape with Bathers (2013.42), while a blustery breeze and approaching downpour disrupt the pastoral tranquility in A Shepherd Driving His Flock in a Stormy Landscape (Fig. 1). Some elements of these compositions occur in traditional images of the months or seasons, and it is possible that they constitute an unconventional suite representing the Four Seasons.
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