Jacob Jacobsz. van Geel

Bears a seal on the reverse incorporating the Royal Arms of France encircled by the Collar of the Order of Saint Michele;
With A.J. Boer, The Hague, 1939;
With David Koetser, Zurich;
From whom acquired for the present collection in the early 1980s.

Delft, Stedelijk Museum het Prinsenhof, De stad Delft – cultuur en maatschappij van 1572 tot 1667, 21 March – 24 May 1981 (not in the catalogue).

The panel is uncradled. The paint surface is flat and secure. There is some slight discoloration to the clouds, perhaps due to a dirty varnish. Otherwise the surface is clean and the colours are strong. Two retouchings are visible at the upper right: the first is a diagonal band measuring approximately 4 cm; the second measures approximately 1 by 1 cm. Inspection under ultraviolet light reveals very few, very small, scattered retouchings at the upper left. Overall the work is in excellent condition.
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The city of Middelburg, on the isolated south-west tip of Zeeland, produced a series of highly individual painters, among whom Jacob van Geel is a rare landscapist. His bosky scenes are instantly identifiable, with their distinctively organic, fungus-like trees, described by Laurens J. Bol as the ‘tormented trees of a tormented artist’ (archival sources reveal that the artist was sued throughout his life by creditors and was deeply unhappy in two marriages).¹ Here, providing a frame to the scene on the right of the composition, the fluidly-painted trunks and rather globular foliage of the woods add a sense of the fantastic to an otherwise tranquil landscape. This painting is executed exquisitely on the characteristically tiny scale of much of van Geel’s comparatively limited œuvre.

Van Geel moved to Delft in 1625, and thence in 1632 to Dordrecht, where this picture was probably painted around 1635.² These works have a much lower viewpoint and their idiosyncratic trees and strong metallic colours notwithstanding, are more naturalistic. In them Van Geel has clearly absorbed some of the developments in landscape painting elsewhere in The Netherlands to which he would have had a greater exposure following his departure from Middelburg.

1. See L.J. Bol, Holländische Maler des 17. Jahrhunderts nahe den grossen Meistern, Brunswick 1969, pp. 110–16.
2. A painting with a comparable low viewpoint, signed and dated 1634, is in a private collection; see S. Segal, G. Jansen and N. Bakker, in Masters of Middelburg, exhibition catalogue, Amsterdam 1984, p. 244, no. 64, reproduced. Other works signed with initials are dated circa 1635–37; Amsterdam 1984, pp. 252–55, nos 68 and 69, reproduced.