Jacob Grimmer Antwerp 1525/6 - 1590 and Gillis Mostaert Hulst circa 1528/9 - 1598 Antwerp

Casa del Marqués de Mondéjar y Conde de Tendillas;
Acquired from the above by Ángela María Téllez Girón, Duquesa de Almenara Alta, in 1920 (as Pieter Brueghel the Elder);
Thence by descent.

"The following condition report has been provided by Sarah Walden, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. These paintings are both on strong oak panels, each with a joint at the upper third of the picture. Both have been cradled in the twentieth century although some decades ago, and in each the upper panel has proved to have rather more of a tendency to curve and/or to have raised ridges of crackle along the grain, while the lower plank has remained fairly stable. The joints have been reglued, presumably when the cradle was added. The upper layer of varnish, which probably also dates from that time, is streaky and tinted, with an open craquelure. It is very opaque under ultra violet light, and to some extent to the naked eye as well, so that older retouching is hard to decipher. Spring. The foreground appears to be in rather fine condition, especially the figures which seem strong and intact. The more delicate background seems patchily thin especially towards the centre: in the lower central clouds, in the central landscape and town in the middle distance, and the foliage against the water, while other areas seem widely better. The joint has old retouching and there are some vague surface retouchings over the varnish in the brown central semi foreground hill, in the left base corner and on the cart on the left, but these do not mean very much. Winter. The upper panel has particularly widespread raised ridges of paint in this painting, with similar old retouching along the joint. Beside the joint there are other lines of old crackle and other lines of retouching near the centre and by the right edge. The lower sky here also appears particularly thin and patchy, as does much of the sky, with patchy wear in the central valley landscape. However beneath the disfiguring tinted varnish the figures are again clearly strong and finely preserved as is the foreground overall, and possibly other areas. This report was not done under laboratory conditions."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

These two large oak panels, one depicting Spring and the other Winter, would have been conceived as part of a set of the four seasons and, given their size, the set must have been amongst Grimmer's most important commissions. While there is no trace of the Summer and Autumn that would have completed the set, it is probable that they repeated the compositions of the same subjects of a complete but much smaller set by Grimmer and Mostaert in which the scenes of Spring and Winter mirror those of the present works (see figs. 1 & 2).¹

Mostaert and Grimmer worked together on numerous landscapes and in their depiction of everyday life, filling every corner with some anecdotal detail, these compositions are perhaps their most successful collaborative works.  They and their workshops clearly repeated them on several further occasions, there being numerous smaller repetitions known, of varying degrees of quality.²  Where the distant landscape of Winter is more typically Grimmer, that of Spring harks back to the previous generation of Flemish landscape painters and, in particular, to the work of Joachim Patenir. Mostaert's figures are inconceivable without that overiding influence on all Flemish painters of the second half of the 16th century, Pieter Bruegel I. It is to him that Mostaert owes the amusing details such as the snowball fight and that Grimmer owes the overall mise-en-scène.

1^. See also R. de Bertier de Sauvigny, Jacob et Abel Grimmer, Brussels 1991, p. 104, reproduced figs. 48 & 49.
2. See, for example, the Winter sold Paris, Tajan, 14 December 1992, lot 27.