Hendrick van Cleve III

In technique and scale, this exceptional drawing is closely comparable with the magnificent bird's eye view of Rome by Van Cleve, signed with initials and dated 1585, one of three outstanding drawings by the artist in the collection of the Fondation Custodia, Paris.¹This, however, is most certainly not a real scene: from a shoreline wooded with both deciduous trees and palms, a river winds past fields, in one of which figures tend to a sacrificial pyre, towards extravagantly rugged mountains. In the foreground a moored European ship is approached by an Ottoman-style rowing galley, while on the shore figures engage in various activities, around buildings that range from cave-dwellings to tree houses.  

Van Cleve, a member of an extensive artist family from Antwerp, is thought to have trained with Frans Floris (1515/20-1570), and worked in his early career alongside his brother, Marten van Cleve the Elder (1527-1581). By 1545 he was in Rome, also travelling to Florence and Naples before returning to Antwerp, where he is recorded once more in 1557. His surviving drawings include large bird's-eye views of the Italian cities that he visited - in addition to the Rome view in the Lugt Collection, panoramas of Florence and Naples are in Rome and Munich² - as well as more fanciful images of more remote locations, such as the View of Jerusalem (1583), also at the Fondation Custodia, into which Van Cleve has introduced slightly incongruous foreground palm trees, very similar to those seen here.³ Lastly, there are entirely imaginary capricci, such as the Coastal Landscape with an Obelisk (1585), in the Rijksmuseum, and also the present drawing.⁴ It is possible that he made use, in some of his more exotic views, of drawings by the more widely travelled Melchior Lorch (1526-1583), which he is known to have owned. 

A number of Van Cleve's drawings, of both real and imaginary views, were engraved and published in Antwerp by Philips Galle, but this particularly splendid and fanciful view was not. It is likely, though, that like the other large panoramic views mentioned above, it dates from the last decade of the artist's career. Only relatively few drawings by the artist of this originality and ambition survive, and nothing comparable has appeared on the market in recent decades.  

1. Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, inv. 6006; K.G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German Drawings of the XVth and XVIth Centuries of the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris 1992, vol. 1, pp. 85-6, cat. 52

2. Rome, Gabinetto Nazionale delle Stampe, inv. FN 166; Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, inv. 1034

3. Paris, Fondation Custodia, Frits Lugt Collection, inv. 3655; Boon, op. cit., vol. 1, pp. 84-5, cat. 51 

4. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. RP-T-1922-6