Wooded Italianate Landscape with Figures

…; the dealer C.F. Roos; from whom, fl. 20, to the museum, February 1885¹¹NHA, ARS, Kop, inv. 289, p. 20, no. 75 (13 February 1885); NHA, ARS, Kop, inv. 289, p. 23, no. 80 (25 February 1885).

ObjectNumber: SK-A-986

This landscape was acquired as by Adrien-François (Adriaen-Frans) Boudewyns (1644-1719), which attribution remained unchanged until 1987, when Thiéry and Kervyn de Meerendré,²²Y. Thiéry and M. Kervyn de Meerendré, Les peintres flamands de paysage au XVIIe Siecle: Le baroque anversois et l’école bruxelloise, Brussels 1987, p. 172 and note 118. The relevant drawing, inv. no. 4060/445, is signed on the margin ‘f. baudouin’; no date is visible on the recto. In fact closely related to SK-A-986 is inv. no. 10243, signed and dated by A.F. Boudewijns 1680, François’s father. Stefaan Hautekeete of the Department of Drawings, Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels, whose help together with that of Bert Schepers is here gratefully acknowledged. on the basis of a comparison with a drawing thought to be of 1737 in the Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussels, mistakenly assigned it to the younger Adrien-François Boudewyns, who became a pupil of his homonymous uncle on 10 March 1694. Duverger supported this reattribution.³³Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, Munich/Leipzig 1983-, XIII, pp. 308-09. However, the Rijksmuseum landscape is signed with the single initial F (as is the drawing to which Thiéry and Kervyn de Meerendré referred) which points to François and not to his cousin Adrien-François, by whom no signed works are known. On this basis De Lannoy has identified François as the artist responsible for it.⁴⁴G. de Lannoy, ‘Un regard neuf sur Adrien-François Boudewijns (1644-1719) et son fils François (1682-1767)’, Bulletin der Koninklijk Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België/Bulletin Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 43-44 (1994-95), pp. 125-52, esp. p. 144 and note 86. Only one other painting – in fact a pair – by François is known to De Lannoy. But a number of drawings by him are comparable in spirit and are signed in a similar way.⁵⁵Anonymous sales, London (Sotheby’s), 23 March 1978, no. 219; London (Christie’s), 1 May 1979, no. 16; Amsterdam (Sotheby Mak van Waay), 25 April 1983, no. 100; Amsterdam (Sotheby’s), 22 November 1989, no. 138; in addition are those reproduced and/or discussed by G. de Lannoy, ‘Un regard neuf sur Adrien-François Boudewijns (1644-1719) et son fils François (1682-1767)’, Bulletin der Koninklijk Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België/Bulletin Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 43-44 (1994-95), pp. 125-52, esp. pp. 141-144 and figs. 9, 10.

François seems to have worked in the idiom of the prints designed by his father⁶⁶G. de Lannoy, ‘Un regard neuf sur Adrien-François Boudewijns (1644-1719) et son fils François (1682-1767)’, Bulletin der Koninklijk Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België/Bulletin Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 43-44 (1994-95), pp. 125-52, fig. 2. and his erstwhile colleague Abraham Genoels (1640-1723).⁷⁷W.L. Strauss (ed.), The Illustrated Bartsch, New York 1978-, V, pp. 296-362.

The support of west German or Netherlandish oak would have been ready for use from 1640 or more plausibly from ten years later.

Gregory Martin, 2022

G. de Lannoy, ‘Un regard neuf sur Adrien-François Boudewijns (1644-1719) et son fils François (1682-1767)’, Bulletin der Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België/Bulletin Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique 43-44 (1994-95), pp. 125-52, and note 86

1886, p. 102, no. 450a (as Adriaen Frans Boudewijns); 1887, p. 9, no. 61 (as Baudewijns); 1903, p. 41, no. 438 (as Baudewijns); 1976, p. 138, no. A 986 (as Adriaen Frans Boudewijns)

G. Martin, 2022, 'François Boudewyns, Wooded Italianate Landscape with Figures, c. 1750', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6202