Egbert van Drielst

Egbert van Drielst's serene yet grand landscapes constitute a distinctive and significant aspect of Dutch landscape art of the late 18th and early 19th century. Most of them represent seemingly anonymous corners of woodland, yet the artist none the less often took the trouble to identify the locations depicted, most of which were in his native province of Drenthe, in the careful inscriptions to be found on the versos of many of his drawings. 

Van Drielst worked as a painter of wall-hangings to decorate grand interiors, and some of his drawings of this type may have served as studies for such paintings, but in many cases his drawings and watercolors must have been made as independent works, for sale. As Charles Dumas has pointed out, it is most likely that the present pair of drawings fall into the second of these categories, as wall decorations are usually much taller and thinner in format. 

Like any artist producing works for a hungry market, Van Drielst adapted and reused motifs from one composition to another, and the buildings and figure group seen here in the Winter scene are very similar to those in one of a set of four horizontal compositions representing the seasons that the artist executed 15 years later, now in the Gemeentemuseum, The Hague.¹ 

1. B. Gerlagh and E. Koolhaas-Grosfeld, Egbert van Drielst 1745-1818, Zwolle 1995, p. 129, fig 121