Philips Koninck

When this drawing, then unpublished, was offered for sale in Amsterdam in 1988, Werner Sumowski confirmed that he considered it an autograph repetition of a drawing formerly in the Heinemann Collection, New York, and now in the Morgan Library, which is signed with initials and dated 1671 in red chalk, on the verso.¹ In his entry on the drawing, which will be published in the posthumous twelfth volume of the Drawings of the Rembrandt School (see Literature)², Sumowski notes that the drawing shows ‘structural variations’ when compared with the New York version, especially in the foreground. 

Sumowski compared the drawing stylistically with his numbers 1513^x, 1516^x, 1518^x (the first in Chantilly, the others in the British Museum) and in particular with the Berlin Panorama with Trees in the Foreground Right (no. 1519a^x). He also pointed out that other examples are known of Koninck having executed two autograph versions of the same landscape watercolor, such as the pair now in Haarlem (Sumowski no. 1479^x) and at the Fondation Custodia, Paris (Sumowski 1482^x).  

Philips Koninck is widely regarded as one of the greatest painters of panoramic landscape in the Netherlands. Over the course of his career he developed a specific compositional type, characterized by a high point of view and a composition fairly evenly divided between earth and sky, with very few buildings or trees projecting above the horizon line. A winding road or river leads gently through the middle distance, eventually taking the spectator's gaze to the distant horizon. 

Koninck represented these serene and majestic landscapes not only in oils, but also in a relatively small number of drawings, a few of which, like the present sheet, are worked up in watercolor in a way that is more or less unique in 17^th-century Dutch landscape drawing. Such landscape watercolors by Koninck are exceptionally rare on the market. The second version of this composition, now in New York, was sold in 1997³, but otherwise only two such drawings have been offered at auction in the last four decades, namely the superb view of a river estuary, sold in New York in 2004 and now in a private collection⁴, and the majestic, panoramic river landscape, now in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, which appeared in a Paris auction in 1994.⁵ 

Although Koninck was clearly influenced by Rembrandt, there is no evidence that he was a pupil. His landscape drawings also reflect the airy panoramas created by Hendrick Goltzius and the remarkable color prints of Hercules Seghers. Watercolor landscapes on this scale are extremely rare in 17^th-century Dutch art, and were evidently intended to be regarded as finished works in their own right.

1. In. 2006.48; Sumowski, op. cit., vol. 6, New York 1982, no. 1363

2. Kindly shared with us by Dr. David de Witt

3. Sale London, Christie's, 1 July 1997, lot 211 

4. Sale New York, Sotheby's, 21 January 2004, lot 63

5. Los Angeles, Getty Museum, inv. 95.GA.28; sale, Paris, Ader, 28 October 1994, lot 48