Eglon Hendrik van der Neer

Christoph van Loo, Ghent (bears his seal on the reverse with monogram: CVL);

His deceased sale, Paris, Pillet, 25 May 1881, lot 22, for 1,000 Francs;

Acquired by the great-grandfather of the present owners in Paris in the late 19th Century.

E. Schavemaker, Eglon Hendrik van der Neer (1635/36 - 1703). Zijn leven en werk,dissertation, Utrecht 2009, p. 524, no. 172 (under documented lost works); 

E. Schavemaker, Eglon van der Neer (1635/36-1703): his life and his work, Doornspijk 2010, p. 539, cat. no. 141 (under 'Works known from documents').

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's: This painting is on a fine bevelled oak panel with a seal. The panel was perfectly selected and has remained completely flat and stable. It has been essentially in the same family over centuries and the remarkable unworn purity of the surface throughout is rare. There has been a recent light restoration and revarnishing but essentially the delicate paint surface has been untouched by any intrusion or damage over time. There is no retouching, but one tiny nick in the upper foliage near the centre of the top edge. Minor wear along the line of the frame can also be seen near the base. But no trace of wear or thinness can be seen whether in the fragile recession of the landscape or in the minutiae of the delicate flowers or the finesse of the head or hair of the portrait tself. This rare, untouched, perfectly preserved little portrait is most exceptional. This report was not done under laboratory conditions.
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

Until its re-appearance in the autumn of 2013, this picture was known only from its description in the Van Loo sale catalogue of 1881. It dates from late in the artist's career, when he started to paint extremely refined small landscape paintings of luminous lush wooded and pastoral subjects.  In some of these their luminous quality derives from the use of ground gold-leaf mixed into the predominantly green pigments used in the trees and vegetation.¹Van der Neer started to paint these about a decade after he settled in Brussels, and they certainly owe more to the Brussels School landscapes inspired by the sandy woodlands south of the city and pioneered by artists such as Jacques d'Arthois than to any Dutch tradition of landscape painting that Van der Neer grew up with. From the mid 1690s onwards, Van der Neer painted many of these works for the Elector-Palatine Johann Wilhelm in Düsseldorf. They passed via the Electoral palace in Mannheim to the Wittelsbachs in Munich, where, despite deaccessions in the 19th and early 20th Century, a number remain in the collections of the Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen.

This picture is a rare hybrid of such a small landscape with a portrait and a flower still life. It is meticulously painted throughout with a remarkable attention to details, and an overall crystelline clarity that is due to the admixture of gold in the landscape mentioned above, to the lavish use of the pigment of ultramarine made from finely ground lapis lazuli in the dress of the sitter, to the high colour key in which the flowers are painted, and to the artist's highly finished and delicate brushwork.  

In works such as this we see the culmination of the Fijnschilder tradition founded in Leiden by Gerrit Dou and his pupils almost half a century earlier. Other than in the genre of flower painting, this tradition had run its course by the dawn of the 18th Century, perhaps since works like this one, no doubt partly executed under magnification, leave no room for further degrees of refinement. 

1.  No ground gold leaf has been found in the pigments of the present picture.