Aert van der Neer

Churchill-Longman collection, Devon;
With Leonard Koetser, London;
From whom bought by the late owner.

London, Leonard Koetser, Autumn Exhibition, 1966, cat. no. 1.

L. Koetser, Autumn Exhibition, exhibition catalogue, London 1966, p. 2, cat. no. 1, reproduced in colour;
W. Schulz, Aert van der Neer, Doornspijk 2002, p. 147, cat. no. 81, reproduced plate 65, where listed as probably authentic.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting has a quite recent lining, probably for the Koetser Exhibition in 1966. The stretcher and restoration are also presumably from that period. There is fairly extensive retouching, with much possibly superfluous strengthening, but some evident losses from brittleness and flaking at some time in the past: little verticals such as that running down fairly briefly from the centre right of the top edge through the branches, another group apparently of small losses in the upper centre of the sky with others lower down perhaps from a central stretcher bar. But much of the retouching blurs the definition of actual losses. Other individual patches of retouching can be seen around the shoulder and the outline of the arm of the central skater, perhaps over a pentiment, also around the central foreground figure holding a hockey or golf stick. The delicate detail in the landscape is often well preserved, although the finest distant branches are thin and there is strengthening of other branches against the sky, as well sometimes of the sky around them, as also the ice in places. However the lovely scenes in the entire lower left of the painting, both in the distant landscape and in the figures nearby, are beautifully intact generally, as is a large area at lower right, with the little boat iced in, where the artist scored the details with the pointed end of his brush. These areas are finely preserved and unworn. There may well be much unnecessary retouching elsewhere. 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."

The format of this canvas, nearly square, is unusual though not unique in Van der Neer's oeuvre. He often favoured a more upright format which allowed him to more fully express the seemingly boundless skies of the Dutch winter.¹ The composition of this painting, with the horizon line nearly reaching the vertical halfway point, recalls a late winter landscape that Schulz dates to the end of Van der Neer's career, circa 1670, in a private collection.² In both pictures Van der Neer lends greater prominence to the figures in the immediate foreground and the details of the landscape surrounding them. The viewpoint, too, is slightly lower than that which he adopts for his earliest works, allowing for the greater dominance, in terms of pictoral space, of the frozen landscape.  

1.  See for example Schulz, under Literature, figs. 21-28 (cat. nos. 228, 45, 2, 32, 13, 61, 27, 3).
2.  Schulz, op. cit., pp. 149-50, cat. no. 91, reproduced in colour plate 20.