Adriaen Honich (Dordrecht 1643 - Rome (?) after 1683)

Adriaen Honich [Honing] was baptized in Dordrecht on 25 July 1643,¹¹Dordrecht, Gemeentearchief, DTB 5. the son of Huybert Hermansz Honich (1615-1663) and Ariaentje Ariensdr van Dijck (?-?). His earliest known work dates from two decades later, a signed and dated painted View of the Town Hall, Utrecht (1663), preserved in the city’s Centraal Museum (inv. no. 2493).²²C.H. de Jonge, Centraal Museum Utrecht. Catalogus der schilderijen, coll. cat. Utrecht 1952, p. 63. According to the Utrecht municipal accounts, it was sold to the city by his father the same year, when Adriaen was apparently sick in Paris.³³The accounts mention the sale for ‘forty guilders…for (Huybert’s) son, who (was) sick in Paris’; https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/record?query=honich&start=0.

Honich is better documented in Rome than in his native land or during his stay in Paris. It is unclear, for instance, whether the time in France was a proper sojourn or merely a stop on the way to Italy. No later than 1667, Honich must have arrived in Rome,⁴⁴That year he acted as a witness in Rome; ibid. where he is recorded in 1675 and also from 1680 to 1683.⁵⁵There is some doubt about the last period, for the artist who was active then, described in the sources as ‘Adriano Onech’, was apparently born in 1648; G.J. Hoogewerff, De Bentvueghels, The Hague 1952, p. 137. According to Roman parochial archives, Honich lived in the Strada Felice and later ‘al Corso, verso il Babuino’, neighbourhoods that were popular among artists. In Rome, Honich joined the Schildersbent (the society of Northern artists), which assigned him the bent-name Lossenbruy (‘Loose-bridge’). He used that name to sign works. He is best known as a landscape draughtsman, with a special focus on views of the cascades at Tivoli, such as one, dated 1673, in the Special Collections of the Library of the University of Leiden (inv. no. PK-T-AW-545). Among other extant works are two painted still-lifes, both signed and dated 1672, which were on the art market with the J. Kugel Gallery, Paris in 2009.

Annemarie Stefes, 2019

References

A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, II (1719), p. 351; III (1721), p. 102; C. Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters van den vroegsten tot op onzen tijd, 7 vols., Amsterdam 1857-64, III (1859), pp. 722-23; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstlerlexikon, 3 vols., Vienna/Leipzig 1906-11, I (1906), p. 709; U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XVII (1924), p. 444; G.J. Hoogewerff, Nederlandsche kunstenaars te Rome (1600-1725). Uittreksels uit de parochiale archieven, The Hague 1942, pp. 55, 259; G.J. Hoogewerff, De Bentvueghels, The Hague 1952, p. 137; M. Roethlisberger, ‘Adriaen Honing alias Lossenbruy’, Münchner Jahrbuch der bildenden Kunst 14 (1963), pp. 121-28; M. Roethlisberger, ‘À la recherche d’Adriaen Honich’, Bulletin de la Galerie Nationale du Canada 4 (1964), pp. 14-21; A. Beyer et al. (eds.), Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, Munich 1992, LXXIV (2012), pp. 408-09 (entry by G. Seelig); RKD Artists, https://rkd.nl/explore/artists/39429