Roelant Roghman Amsterdam 1627 - 1692

The Rt. Hon. The Earl of Dalhousie, M.C., Brechin Castle, Angus;
By whom sold, London, Christie's, 25 October 1957, lot 103, for £320 to The Pelham Gallery;
With A. de Castro, Rome, 1958;
Anonymous sale, New York, Christie's, 18 January 1984, lot 158;
with Sam Nystad, The Hague, from whom bought by the present owner in 1986.

AAmsterdam, Rijksmuseum, De kasteeltekeningen van Roelant Roghman, 30 June-9 September 1990

W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schuler, Landau/Pfalz 1983 and later, vol. IV, p. 2482, no. 1661, reproduced in colour p. 2486;
P.C. Sutton, Masters of 17th-Century Dutch Landscape Painting, exhibition catalogue, Boston 1987, p. 435, under no. 79;
W.Th. Kloek, De kasteeltekeningen van Roelant Roghman, Alphen aan de rijn 1990, vol. II, p. 44, no. 25, reproduced p. 45.

None of Roghman's paintings are dated, and we have little idea of the chronology of his works.  His paintings are typically large-scale hilly landscapes influenced by Rembrandt and Hercules Seghers, and also by his teacher (and uncle) Roelandt Savery.  His indebtednes to Rembrandt is more clearly seen in his pen drawings, many done in an easily recognisable style in reed pen and ink, and in his etchings.  At times, and especially in his brushwork, his landscapes recall those of other Rembrandt followers, such as Jan Lievens and Philips Koninck.

Werner Sumowski has suggested that this picture and another of broadly similar compositional organisation in Paris, Fondation Custodia were probably based on a single lost drawing[1].  Like most of Roghman's paintings, and many of this drawings, this picture is a fully-realised fantasy view of a richly wooded river valley surrounded by sparsely-vegetated hills, at the point of confluence of faster and slower flowing streams, and typically for him, it is composed with a strong receding diagonal specified by the bridge.  Roghman always painted with a richly-loaded brush, using shades of green, yellow and brown, including the luminous yellow-green tones where the landscape is bathed in sunlight.  In this respect tonal, Roghman's landscapes are nonetheless much more expressive than his tonal landscape compatriots, depicting exotic landscapes that are almost certainly derived purely from the imagination of this artist who is thought never to have travelled beyond the confines of the Netherlands, and who thus would probably never have seen a mountain, or even a hill of any consequence[2]. 

Provenance
An ancestor of the Earls of Dalhousie must have had a considerable interest in the Rembrandt School, since an album known as the Dalhousie Album, made up of sheets of drawings by Rembrandt and his School, particularly the Dordrecht pupils Nicolaes Maes and Samuel van Hoogstraeten, of whom the album contained a substantial proportion of their drawn oeuvre, was sold by the family to Colnaghi in 1922.  Each of the sheets bore the Dalhousie collector's mark, but alas, as Lugt's compiler sadly noted: `L'actuel Earl of Dalhousie ne dispose d'aucune information sur un collectionneur de ses ancêtres qui aurait eu la marque de la collection, et encore moins sur les initiales'; so we do not know who this pioneering Scottish collector of the Rembrandt School actually was[3]. 

1.  See Sumowski under Literature, where the Paris painting (Coll. F. Lugt 6558) is p. 2482, no. 1662, reproduced p. 2487. 
2.  For a detailed discussion of his paintings, see Wouter Kloek under Literature, Hoofdstuk I, pp. 1-47, and especially pp. 40-47.
3.  See F. Lugt, Les Marques de Collections... Supplément, The Hague 1956, p. 106, under no. 717a.