Description
- Johannes Lingelbach
- A roman street scene with a vegetable market;A roman street scene with market stalls and strolling players
the latter signed lower left (possibly reinforced): J.Lingelbach F
a pair, both oil on canvas
Provenance
Possibly Jacob de Bruijn, his sale, Amsterdam, v.d. Land de Leth, 17 April 1754, lot 11 (vegetable market scene only);
Possibly H. Wolters, his sale, Amsterdam, Croese, 4 May 1757, lot 2 (vegetable market scene only);
Possibly Johan van der Linden van Slingeland, Dordrecht;
His deceased sale, Dordrecht, Yver/Delfos, 22 August 1785, lot 249 (scene with strolling players only);
Possibly Jhr. van Beijma thoe Kingma, Franeker;
His deceased sale et al., Amsterdam, Roos, 25 October 1876, lot 42 (scene with strolling players only);
With Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox Ltd., London;
Private collection, Rome;
Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 2 July 1976, lot 3 (strolling players scene only);
Anonymous sale, Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, 10 December 1976, lot 967 (strolling players scene only);
Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, 25 March 1977, lot 23, where acquired by the present owner.
Literature
A. Busiri Vici, "Fantasie romane di Johannes Lingelbach", in Studi Romani, no. 7, 1959, p. 52, reproduced plate XIV;
C. Burger-Wegener, Johannes Lingelbach 1622-1674, Dissertation, University of Berlin, 1976, pp. 117, 247-8, cat. nos. 48 and 49.
Catalogue Note
These are typical late works by Lingelbach, painted in an idiom that had for long been a source of his most popular and accomplished work. The views are not specific, nor would they have been intended to be, for northern collectors sought only impressions of Rome and not historically accurate reconstructions of its streets. Nevertheless, Lingelbach frequently incoporated actual Roman monuments into such scenes: here, for example, in the left background of the vegetable market scene appears the church of Santo Stefano Rotondo, and on the extreme left margin of the composition, the Temple of Vesta. Despite the popularity of these crowded Roman piazze, Lingelbach seems only rarely to have painted them in pairs; Burger-Wegener, for example, lists only one other pair, that now in the collection of the Marquess of Bath at Longleat (see Literature below, pp. 222-3, cat. nos. 9 and 10), and the present pair has itself only recently been re-united. Burger-Wegener (op. cit., pp. 117-8) suggests a dating of around 1670 for the present pair, on account of their greater naturalism and movement and the inclusion of exotic details such as the turkish rider. The details of the early history suggested by Burger-Wegener (ibid.) are unclear and these descriptions may therefore relate to these or to other similar Roman scenes.
