Quality in Detail. The Juli and Andrew Wieg Collection
Quality in Detail. The Juli and Andrew Wieg Collection
Jacob Sibrandi Mancadan
Landscape with figures near Roman ruins
Lot Closed
March 24, 04:18 PM GMT
Estimate
8,000 - 12,000 GBP
Lot Details
Description
Jacob Sibrandi Mancadan
Minnertsga 1602 - 1680 Tjerkgaast
Landscape with figures near Roman ruins
oil on oak panel
unframed: 31.7 x 32.7 cm.; 12 1/2 x 12 7/8 in.
framed: 43 x 44 cm.; 16 7/8 x 17 3/8 in.
With Gallery Dr. O. Hirschmann, Amsterdam, 1939;
Anonymous sale, London, Sotheby's, 28 November 1956, lot 73;
Dr. H.A. Wetzlar (1922-77), Amsterdam, by 1957;
F.C. Butôt (1906-92), Amsterdam and Sankt Gilgen, by 1963;
His posthumous sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 17 November 1993, lot 32, where acquired for the Wieg collection.
C. Boschma, 'Nieuwe gegevens omtrent J.S. Mancadan', in Oud Holland, vol. LXXXI, 1966, p. 84, reproduced plate 2;
L.J. Bol, Hollandse en Vlaamse Kunst uit de 17e eeuw, exh. cat., Rotterdam 1973, p. 72, reproduced p. 73;
L.J. Bol and G.S. Keyes, Netherlandish paintings and drawings from the collection of F.C. Butôt by little-known and rare masters of the seventeenth century, London 1981, pp. 104-105, cat. no. 35, reproduced.
Jacobus Sibrandi Mancadan came from the region of Friesland, one of the two most Northern Dutch provinces, where he spent his entire life. He was burgomaster of Franeker between 1637 and 1639 and only became a painter after he settled in Leeuwarden in 1645. In addition to works depicting the Frisian countryside, he painted a group of Italianate landscapes with ruins and arcadian subjects, though there is no evidence that he ever travelled to Italy.
Mancadan's landscapes are highly distinctive. They have an arid, empty air and are usually almost devoid of vegetation; the painter was by far more interested in the texture of naked sandy soil and rock which he rendered with thick creamy-yellow paint. As an amateur artist working in Friesland, remote from the artistic centres of Holland, Mancadan developed an entirely personal idiosyntratic landscape style which does not in any way reflect contemporary developments in Dutch landscape painting.
A drawing with an almost identical composition to the present work is recorded by the RKD as with Wertheim in Paris in 1955.1
A note on provenance
This painting has been part of three famous Dutch collections, first Wetzlar, then Butôt and subsequently Wieg. Dr. Hans Wetzlar (1922-77) began collecting in the 1930s in Amsterdam, primarily assembling paintings of the Dutch Golden Age. Under the influence of art historian Max Friedländer, Wetzlar gradually extended his collection to include paintings from other Northern schools. Friedländer wrote a preface to a catalogue of Wetzlar's collection, published in 1952. His collection was dispersed at auction following his death in 1977.
Frans Butôt, universally known as F.C Butôt (1906-92), was the scion of a dynasty of Amsterdam tobacco merchants. Although he started collecting Old Masters in 1937 (a Droochsloot), and assembled a small collection before the Second World War which was dispersed, it was the resumption of the Indonesian tobacco trade in 1950 which enabled him to resume collecting, and on a considerably greater scale. Butôt resolved early on to concentrate on the very best works that he could find (drawings as well as paintings) by lesser known Dutch and Flemish masters, aware that this was then an almost wholly neglected field of connoisseurship. Fiercely independent-minded and critical of others as well as of himself, he set himself the highest standards in seeking out the best works by these ‘petit maîtres’, and applied the most rigorous of criteria in his collecting: not only of quality but also of condition.
While Butôt was an autodidact and rarely took advice in his collecting, he maintained close friendships with scholars who shared his passions, most notably Laurens J. Bol (1898-1994), Director of the Dordrechts Museum from 1949 to 1965. Laurens Bol organised an exhibition of F.C. Butôt’s collection in Salzburg and Rotterdam in 1972-3, and co-edited with George S. Keyes a catalogue of the Butôt collection, published by Sotheby’s in 1981 (the catalogue entries were written by Butôt himself; see Exhibited and Literature).