…; recorded as a chimney piece in Laan 5, The Hague, the premises of the Stadsapotheek, 1844-81;¹¹Note RMA.…; bequeathed by Arnoldus Andries des Tombe (1818-1902), The Hague, to the museum, 1903

Object number: SK-A-2096

Credit line: A.A. des Tombe Bequest, The Hague

Bequeathed as attributed to the French School and later recognized as being south Netherlandish, the condition and poor handling are such that a more precise attribution would be foolhardy.

The theme of an elegant company in a landscape had been popularized in the southern Netherlands by the woodcuts by Christoffel Jegher (1596-1653) after Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577-1640) Conversation à La Mode (Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid). ²²D. Bodart, Rubens e l’incisione nelle collezione del Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampa, exh. cat. Rome (Villa della Farnesina alla Lungara) 1977, p. 84, nos. 157-58.

The motif of a classical-style fountain in a wooded landscape was treated by the Antwerp landscape painter Gaspar de Witte (1624-1681), in whose pictures the staffage was usually contributed by a collaborator, for instance, Erasmus Quellinus II (1607-1678) as in the picture formerly in a private collection, Brussels.³³J.-P. de Bruyn, Erasmus II Quellinus, 1607-1678. De schilderijen met catalogue raisonné, Freren 1988, no. 161. That picture is recorded as signed and dated by De Witte 1654 and also signed with Quellinus’s initials. The Rijksmuseum work was probably executed later, in the 1660s, to judge from the costumes of the elegant company.

The marble fountain – seemingly out of place in a glade – was intended to be antique and may not have been imaginary; it consists of an urn supported by a river god on a plinth above a sculpted basin.

Gregory Martin, 2022

1903, p. 4, no. 33 (as anonymous French school, last half of the seventeenth century); 1934, p. 4, no. 33 (as anonymous French school, last half of the seventeenth century); 1976, p. 693, no. A 2906 (as Southern Netherlandish school)

G. Martin, 2022, 'anonymous, Elegant Company at an Antique Fountain in a Glade, Southern Netherlands, c. 1660 - c. 1670', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20027032