Frans Jansz. Post

In the collection of the family of the present owner for at least four generations.

The following condition report is provided by Sarah Walden who is an external specialist and not an employee of Sotheby's. This painting is on a small panel, bevelled behind along the base and left edges. It remains flat and shows no sign of flaking, past or present. A faint brief old crack can just be seen to the left of the house and perhaps in the veranda. There are a few streaks of rather rough, quite recent retouching in the sky, apparently superficial and added for cosmetic reasons to brighten the original sky. This has the greyish tone characteristic of smalt, which loses its blue colour over time, and was frequently used at this period. A streak along the horizon has been retouched in blue with a wider streak of yellow in the central sky from the trees on the left across to the other side where it spreads almost down to the skyline. There's one further narrower yellow streak of retouching across the sky above. However the original sky elsewhere is unworn and intact, naturally having lost its original blue. The lower part of the landscape is also in good unworn condition, with the vegetation and figures well preserved (only the pantaloons of the nearest figure have a thinner patch). The copper resinate green of the foliage has become brown but is unworn and intact as is much of the foliage against the sky, with some wear just at the top of the trees on either side.
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As far as is known, Post painted nothing other than views or capriccio views of Brazil, the country where he spent seven remarkable years between 1637 and 1644 with the Dutch colonists under Prince Maurits. While only seven paintings (and some drawings) survive from his time in Brazil, from what was a much larger body of work, during the remaining 36 years of his life back in the Netherlands he drew on his recollections from his Brazilian sojourn, evoking for his clientele a sometimes literal (from drawings) but more often partly imagined view of a distant land that must have seemed as alien to them as it did to Post on his disembarkation there in 1637.

Post continued to provide such works for an avid collecting public until the final year of his life and this painting, which came to light only at the end of 2010, has been dated by Pedro Corrêa do Lago to the beginning of the so-called 'fourth phase' of Post's production, circa 1670. It retains much of the brilliance more usually associated with Post's 'third phase' (1661-1669), such as the beautifully observed vine creeping over the rocks in the foreground and the wonderful array of well-crafted natives and Europeans making their way to the church. In terms of composition, execution and technique the work is perhaps best compared with two other views of the marshy plains (called varzea), one dated 1664, the other 1665.¹ With the 1664 dated work in the John and Mable Ringling Museum, Florida, it shares both a composition built along remarkably similar lines and similar foreground detailing. This compositional type is one oft-repeated in Post's works of the 1660s and 1670s creating as it did a wonderful sense of depth, the eye being led down from the higher ground, dominated by the heavy shades of closely observed flora, to the lighter tones of the distant village and lower marshes.

The do Lagos see the Ringling panel as foreshadowing the painter's style in his fourth phase and compare it to the Landscape with a Sugar Mill in National Museum in Rio de Janeiro which they date to the early 1670s.² With the present work Post seems to have taken much greater care than with this latter however, the detailing of the foreground flora and staffage in particular harking back more obviously to the works of the mid-1660s such as the afore-mentioned 1665 dated Varzea landscape. Such discrepancies in the quality of Post's work from one year to another are not uncommon throughout his oeuvre; 1664, when he painted the Ringling work, was a fateful year in the artist's personal life and the likely cause of the artist's gradual decline, but by 1665 when he painted the other version he was clearly back to his best. The present work is amongst the more accomplished panels from circa 1670, comparing favourably with, for example, the landscapes in the London National Gallery and a private collection in Brasilia, two of the best works from the 'fourth phase'.³

The inspiration of the chapel façade may well be the Franciscan convent of Saint Anthony in Igaraçu that Post painted on several occasions, most prominently in the painting now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection, Madrid. Sousa-Leao attributed the design of the similar chapel in one of the Instituto Ricardo Brennad works (both of which portray a chapel of remarkably similar design to that in this painting) to Post's imagination and knowledge of architecture but the fact that the basic design appears in no fewer than (now) seven works, each with only minor differences in the detailing, would suggest that the inspiration is something more 'concrete', probably a since lost topographical drawing from his time in Brazil.⁴

The tonality of the sky is common to Posts from the mid-1660s onwards and it seems probable that the appearance of the sky now is close to its original intention; amongst numerous examples manifesting the seemingly afternoon hues present here are the 1664-dated Ringling view and, into the fourth phase where the effect is more common, the Ruins of Olinda cathedral (Fundaçao Maria Luisa e Oscar Americano, Sao Paolo),⁵ and paintings in private collections in Brasilia and Sao Paolo;⁶  however there may be some degree of smalt degradation in all of these works.  The panel here is bevelled on the lower and right hand edges (as viewed from the reverse), which is typical of panels from Post's mature period. It seems likely that he commonly cut four smaller panels out of one larger.

Following first hand inspection, the attribution has been fully endorsed by Pedro Corrêa do Lago and Frits Duparc. The painting will be included in the Corrêa do Lagos forthcoming English language edition of the addendum to their 2007 catalogue.

1.  See. P. & B. Corrêa do Lago, Frans Post, Brazil 2007, pp. 238-9, nos. 75 and 76.
2.  Ibid, p. 303, no. 122.
3.  Ibid., pp. 306-7, nos. 125, 126.
4.  The main difference between the present work and the other six is the inclusion here of a rectangular grated window beneath the apex of the roof, where all the others depict a circular window. The other six also include a crossbeam immediately below the window. For the six see Correa do Lago, pp. 226-7, no. 65 (Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, Caracas); pp. 304-305, nos. 123 & 124 (two in the Instituto Ricardo Brennand, Recife); p. 306, no. 125 (National Gallery of London); p. 307, no. 126 (Private collection, Brasilia); p. 327, no. 146 (private collection, Sao Paolo).
5.  Ibid., no. 120.
6.  Ibid., nos. 126 and 146.