PYKE KOCH | Florentijnse tuin (Florentine Garden)

Vis Collection, Maastricht (acquired from the artist) Sale: Sotheby Mak van Waay B.V., Amsterdam, 24th-25th April 1978, lot 392

Private Collection, The Netherlands

Loek Brons Kunsthandel, Amsterdam

Acquired from the above by the family of the present owner in 1989

Venice, XXI Esposizione Biennale Internazionale d'Arte, 1938, no. 3A Brussels, Galerie 86, Openingstentoonstelling, 1966

Enschede, Rijksmuseum Twenthe & Zeist, Slot Zeist, Het magisch realisme in de Nederlandse schilderkunst. Een zelfstandige stroming?, 1981-82, no. 33, illustrated in the catalogue

Rotterdam, Kunsthal, De Blijvende Verlokking Kunstenaars uit de Lage Landen in Italië 1806-1940, 2003, illustrated in the catalogue

Spanbroek, Frisia Museum, Fresco’s & Fellini. Pyke Koch geïnspireed door Italië, 2004, no. 14, illustrated in the catalogue

T. S., ‘De Biennale te Venetië’, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, 9th July 1938 Carel Scharten, ‘Italië en Nederland op de Biennale’, De Telegraaf, 28th July 1938

Q. van Tiel, ‘XXI Biennale van Venetië’, Verf en Kunst, 1938, no. 10, pp. 4-8

Jan Engelman, Pyke Koch, Amsterdam, 1941, p. 33

Carel Blotkamp, Pyke Koch, Amsterdam, 1972, no. 27, illustrated p. 164

Carel Blotkamp, Pyke Koch, Utrecht, 1982, illustrated p. 97

Carel Blotkamp & Dory Kicken, Pyke Koch Schilderijen en tekeningen/Paintings and Drawings, Rotterdam, 1995, no. 30, illustrated p. 214 

Andreas Koch, Roman Koot, Mieke Rijnders & Marja Bosma, De wereld van Pyke Koch, Zwolle, 2017, no. 11, illustrated p. 58

Painted in 1938, Florentijnse tuin is an evocative masterwork of magical realism by the Dutch painter Pyke Koch. Born Pieter Frans Christian Koch, the artist grew up in The Netherlands adopting his nickname Pyke after the English name for the pike fish. Koch spent a considerable amount of his artistic education studying Italian Quattrocento masters such as Piero della Francesca, who inspired in him a desire to pursue technical perfection, and he became fascinated with the theme of the enclosed garden, the hortus conclusus, an allegorical term in Renaissance poetry derived from the Song of Solomon. These meticulous hours of study, combined with a unique imagination, resulted in Koch's highly stylised and visually uncanny paintings. Koch’s desire for perfection, however, meant that he worked slowly and deliberately destroyed much of his creative output. What survives today comprises of approximately 120 paintings and 80 drawings, many of which reside within prominent collections in The Netherlands.  In December 1937 Koch and his wife Heddy (Hedwig de Geer) moved to Florence and signed a two-year rental agreement for the Villa Ruspoli. However, when they arrived they found the house in such a state of dilapidation that Koch was unable to paint and had to travel frequently to Utrecht. The garden in Florentijnse tuin was inspired by the celebrated Renaissance revival gardens of Villa La Pietra (fig.3), then owned by Arthur and Hortense Acton, whose son - the aesthete and author Sir Harold Acton - was a friend of Pyke Koch and his wife and would later inherit the estate.  

Within this surreal alternate reality, a partly obscured hat and a colourful ball beautifully balance the composition whilst addressing themes of enclosure and concealment. The well-manicured hedges simultaneously shut out and reveal and their forms are echoed in the perpendicular columns of cypresses in the background. Beyond the luminescent green of the garden the verdant landscape is reminiscent of the French artist Henri Rousseau, whose work Koch greatly admired, and its wilderness is juxtaposed against the orderliness of the decorative garden in an ironic gesture. Encircled by a cracked stone wall on the verge of collapse the garden appears threatened.

Amidst the rising political tensions in Europe, the 1930s were a time in which magical realism and Koch’s paintings began to draw considerable attention. In 1938 Koch represented The Netherlands at the Venice Biennale exhibiting his entire artistic production from 1936-38, including the present work. Upon seeing Florentijnse tuin the critic Carel Scharten commented: ‘I won’t easily forget the surreal Florentine garden, with its hellish-green cypress hedges that seem to be sculpted from light, in which the blindfolded, grappling woman with a tragic mask and a shouting mouth, realizes, that she has been deserted’ (C. Scharten, ‘Italië en Nederland op de Biennale’, De Telegraaf, 28th July 1938, translated from Dutch). Painting allowed Koch to externalise his anxieties by making manifest the imagery of the garden that haunted him. According to Carel Blotkamp, painting ‘undoubtedly had a therapeutic effect (…) in which he freed himself of the image which caused the obsession’ (C. Blotkamp, quoted in Andreas Koch & Roman Koot, De wereld van Pyke Koch, Zwolle, 2017). The Florentine hortus conclusus permeates Koch’s consciousness and resonates an air of timelessness; it shifts and moves between landscapes suggesting the passage of innumerable years and remaining gloriously enigmatic. 



We would like to thank Mieke Rijnders and Carel Blotkamp for their kind help in cataloguing the present lot.