Willem Schellinks

Sir William Tite, M.P., circa 1857;
Mrs. Abbot, by 1881;
Anonymous sale, London, Christie's, July 25, 1947, lot 166, £78-15 to Smith;
Private collection, Amsterdam;
With Galerie Schlichte Bergen, Amsterdam;
With Chaucer Fine Arts, London, 1981;
Private collection, United Kingdom;
With Robert Noortman, from whom acquired by a private collector for £180,000;
By whom anonymously sold ("The Property of a Private Collector"), London, Sotheby's, December 8, 2004, lot 30, for £123,500, where acquired by the present owner.

Manchester, Art Treasures Exhibition, 1857, no. 1017;
London, Chaucer Fine Arts, Collecting in the 18th Century:  Paintings and Drawings and Works of Art, 1981, no. 5;
Rome, Centro Culturale "Galleria Cembalo Borghese," Paesaggi, Vedute e Costumi, 1989, no. 21;
Montreal, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, Italian Recollections:  Dutch Painters of the Golden Age, 1990, no. 58.

P.T.A. Swillens, "Eeen schilderij van Willem Schellinks," in Medelingen van Het Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, vol. 4, 1949, pp. 19-21, reproduced;
A. Ch. Steland-Stief, "Jan Asselijn und Willem Schellinks," in Oud Holland, vol. 79, 1964, pp. 99-100;
A. Ch. Steland-Stief, Jan Asselijn, Amsterdam 1971, pp. 102-103, reproduced;
L. Salerno, Pittori di paesaggio del Seicento a Roma, vol. II, Rome 1977-78, p. 754;
A. van Suchtelen, ed., Winters van weleer:  Het Hollandse winterlandschap in de Gouden Eeuw, exhibition catalogue, Mauritshuis, The Hague 2001, p. 130, reproduced.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com , an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has been quite recently restored. It has an old lining, yet the paint layer itself has been more recently cleaned and varnished, and the picture should be hung as is. The restoration is very good. It attends to a combination of thinness, staining and slight loss here and there throughout the picture. There are no concentrations except possibly in the upper right sky. There is some thinness in the archways on the left side which has been restored, some losses around the edges and the kind of wear and tear that develops in a picture of this period. This painting has been well restored and should be hung as is.
"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."

Winter landscapes by Dutch Italianate artists are extremely rare.  One of the principle concerns of these painters was to convey a sense of atmosphere in their idealized views of the Roman campagna.  It is not surprising, then, that when it came to painting a winter landscape Schellinks should have chosen to concentrate on evoking the mood of that season, rather than using it as a backdrop for busy activity and anecdotal detail, as did the majority of his non-Italianate contemporaries.

This painting was first published by Swillens in 1949, who dated it to the artist's full maturity, between 1665 when he returned to Amsterdam, and his death there in 1678.  It has many parallels with the artist's City Wall in Winter, signed with monogram, oil on canvas, 74 by 105 cm., in Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum (inv. A 2112 ; see A. Ch. Steland-Stief, Jan Asselijn, Amsterdam 1971, p. 179, plate LXXII), which also dates from this period.  Both paintings are likely to have been inspired by a Winter Landscape by Jan Asselijn in the Worcester Art Museum, Worcester, Massachusetts (inv. 1969.24).  Interestingly, Schellinks has depicted more recognisably Roman buildings than has Asselijn.  The large, partially ruined bridge dominating the left of the composition is the Milvian Bridge, which often appears in works by other Dutch Italianate painters.  The round tower beyond is almost certainly intended to be the Tomb of Caecilia Metella.  The use of such evident reminiscences of the once mighty Roman Empire, seen under the bitter cold of winter, serves only to heighten the sense of melancholic introspection in this hauntingly atmospheric picture.