Lucas van Uden

With B. Tiffin, London (according to an old inscription, verso);

bears unidentified collectors mark, verso (E.R. written in brown ink) (L.896);

with Richard Day, London, by 1968 (according to the archives of the Fondation Custodia, cited under L.896);

with P. & D. Colnaghi and Co, London;

Harry Lawrence Bradfer-Lawrence (1887-1965),

by inheritance to his son,

Col. P.L. Bradfer-Lawrence (1917-2005);

London art market in 1987, where acquired by the late mother of the present owner

London, Arts Council, Watercolours and Drawings from the Bradfer-Lawrence Collection, 1953, no. 59;

Wellesley, Mass., The Davis Museum and Arts Center, Wellesley College, and The Cleveland Museum of Art, Flemish Drawings in the Age of Rubens: Selected Works from American Collections, 1993, no. 72 (exhibited only in Wellesley)

By the late 1620s, Lucas van Uden had established himself as one of Antwerp’s leading landscape painters, but although his paintings have been much admired both in his own time and thereafter, it is on the basis of his work as a draughtsman that the artist’s enduring reputation chiefly rests. All the same, his drawings remain relatively rare, and no major example of his work comparable to this in terms of scale, compositional ambition, quality of execution and exceptionally fresh condition has come to the market in more than forty years.¹   

With their characteristic atmosphere of poetic serenity and their great technical originality, Van Uden’s finest drawings constitute a distinctive high point in seventeenth-century Flemish landscape drawing. Typically, they depict either clumps of elegantly towering trees or expansive woodland scenes such as this, with glimpses of distant vistas, the dappled light falling through the soaring oaks. In terms of technique, Van Uden generally draws the great majority of his composition with very precise, almost minutely detailed lines in pen and lightish brown ink, and then builds on this structure with broadly applied wash and gouache, primarily of a distinctive turquoise-blue hue, but sometimes enlivened with delicate touches of white and occasionally also yellow. 

To some extent, this combination of techniques echoes stylistic precedents set by Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625), thirty years Van Uden’s senior, and even reflects certain drawings by his contemporary Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641), but in terms of atmosphere the only real parallels to be found in seventeenth-century Flemish art are with the handful of late landscape drawings by Rubens, made during the 1630s, when, following the purchase of his country estate of Het Steen, he seems to have immersed himself in nature as never before.     

But if there is a certain similarity of mood between some of Rubens’s landscape drawings and those of Van Uden, there are no real signs of any direct stylistic or professional connection between the two artists. Even though Van Uden was living and working in Antwerp during the 1620s and ‘30s, when Rubens was at the height of his fame and success, and made at least one copy of a Rubens landscape painting, the two artists seem to have trodden separate paths. Unlike other leading landscape artists of the moment such as Jan Wildens (1586-1653), Van Uden seems, perhaps surprisingly, never to have collaborated with Rubens, who regularly worked with Wildens and others, adding figures to their landscape compositions. Van Uden preferred, when collaborating, to work with artists such as Jacques Jordaens (1593-1678), David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) and Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678).

Rather than the art of his great contemporary or that of any illustrious predecessor, Van Uden’s chief sources of inspiration when making his exceptional landscape drawings seem to have been his own artistic spirit, and nature itself. As his biographer Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) recounts, Van Uden often 'awakened at the crack of dawn and went out to the fields and the woods,'² a devotion to the study of nature that is abundantly reflected in his extraordinarily accomplished and atmospheric landscape drawings, of which this is finest example to come to the market in several decades.

^1.Only two other drawings by Van Uden of any significant quality, but neither comparable in importance to this, have been sold at auction during this period: the panoramic landscape in the first sale of the Van Regteren Altena Collection (London, Christie’s, 10 July 2014, lot 17), and the river view sold, New York, Sotheby’s, 23 January 2001, lot 150.  

^2.A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, Amsterdam, 1718-21, I, p. 158).