SEBASTIAEN VRANCX | An extensive landscape with marauders hijacking wagon, a moated castle and the city of Antwerp beyond | 塞巴斯蒂安・弗蘭克斯 | 《強盜搶劫馬車，遠眺被護城河圍繞的城堡與安特衛普城景》

Offenheim collection, Austria;

Anonymous sale, New York, Christie's, 18 May 1994, lot 11, for $135,000;

There acquired by the father of the present owner;

Thence by inheritance.

Vrancx lived in turbulent times and he would have clearly remembered the wartime devastation and horrors during his childhood in Antwerp. Throughout his successful career, Vrancx transformed the large-scale battle scenes of the sixteenth century into smaller scale cavalry scenes and skirmishes, in which the reality of warfare for many of his countrymen and day to day life during the Eighty Years War overshadowed any recognition for the heroics of chivalry. In so doing, Vrancx created a standard type for the genre that would be employed by his contemporaries and followers for generations. 

This painting does not depict an historical event. In it we see Vrancx’s predilection for the ‘skirmish’ subject matter, which gave him the perfect platform for the theatrical, dramatic tendency that dominates his art throughout his career. The horse-driven cart, laden with household goods, surely cannot be the cause of the extensive and bloody skirmish all around it and instead must simply have found itself unintentionally caught up in it. It is thus purely a centrepoint around which Vrancx’s depiction plays out: the bloody ransacking of a small village. Beyond it, as a counterpoint, is a peaceful and rather beautiful moated castle, and beyond that still, the city of Antwerp, the cathedral spire clearly visible against the skyline. The scene may be inspired by such events as the sacking of Wommelgem by troops of the Dutch Republic on 26 May 1589 after the villagers refused to pay tribute. Vrancx executed several versions of that subject: a painting sold New York, Sotheby’s, 22 May 2019, lot 33; another of circa 1615–20 in the Kunstmuseum in Düsseldorf;¹ another dated 1629, sold at auction in December 1999, for $565,946;² and one of circa 1630–40 in a private Belgian collection;³ and there is also a drawing at the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg.^4

¹ Inv. no. 47, oil on oak panel, 55.1 x 85 cm., monogrammed. An autograph replica of this composition is in the collection at the Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 1104, oil on panel, 75 x 107 cm., monogrammed.  

² Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 16 December 1999, lot 9. Oil on oak panel, 75 x 143 cm.

³ Oil on panel, 87 x 170 cm., monogrammed. See J. van der Auwera, 'Historical Fact and Artistic Fiction, the face of the Eighty Years War in Southern Netherlandish Paintings, in particular those of Sebastian Vrancx (1573–1647) and Pieter Snayers (1592–1667)', in 1648: War and Peace in Europe, exh. cat., 1998, vol. 2, p. 463, reproduced fig. 3. 

⁴ Inv. no. 14237, pen and brown ink and brown wash on paper, 160 x 310 mm., monogrammed.