Attributed to David Vinckboons Mechelen 1576 - 1629 Amsterdam

Louis Lamblin, Brussels;
Thence by descent to the present owner.

Although its authorship is not certain, the composition and style of this elegant landscape find many parallels in the late landscapes of David Vinckboons. A protestant whose family had fled Antwerp to settle in Amsterdam in 1586, Vinckboons played a crucial role in the development of genre and landscape painting in the northern Netherlands. The elegant figures found here are particularly reminiscent of the somewhat overdressed sportsmen and courtiers that characteristically populate his large landscape panels of this format. Very similar figures and hunting dogs are to be found, for instance, in two landscapes with stag hunts sold New York, Sotheby's, 10 October 1991, lot 9, and London, Christie's, 11 December 1987, lot 75 (both reproduced in J. Briels, Peintres flamands au berceau du Siècle d'Or hollandais 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, p. 220, figs. 338 and 339). The same receding forest paths and riverside village, again with very similar staffage may also be paralleled in another Wooded landscape in a private collection (reproduced in J. Briels, Peintres flamands en Hollande, Antwerp 1987, p. 352, fig. 451). All of these landscapes share a common debt to the work of an earlier Flemish emigré Gillis van Coninxloo (1544-1607), who had worked in Frankenthal in the Palatinate before also settling in Amsterdam. The present painting shares these influences and it is possible that its author may also have come from the ranks of the other protestant landscape painters in Coninxloo's circle in Frankenthal, such as Jacques van der Wyhen, or Willem van den Bundel (1577-1655), in whose Landscape with sportsmen (sold London, Sotheby's, 6 December 1989, lot 23), very similar massed foliage, figures and distant vista can all be found.