NICOLAES PIETERSZ. BERCHEM | Southern landscape with shepherds and their animals fording a stream

Francis Gibson (1805–58), Saffron Walden, by 1830;

By descent to his daughter Elizabeth Pease Gibson (1830–70), who in 1858 married

Sir Lewis Fry MP (1832–1921), Saffron Walden, Bristol and London, 1902; 

With B. Houthakker, Amsterdam;

With Noortman, Maastricht, 1994;

With Salomon Lilian, Amsterdam and Geneva, 1994;

Private collection, The Netherlands.

Whitechapel Art Gallery, Dutch Exhibition, exh. cat., London 1904, p. 52, cat. no. 411;

C. Hofstede de Groot, A catalogue raisonné..., vol. IX, Esslingen/Paris 1926, p. 155, cat. no. 364;

B. Coenen, Old master paintings, Salomon Lilian, Amsterdam 1994, p. 4, reproduced in colour.

London, Royal Academy, 1902, no. 17 (according to Hofstede de Groot 1926, see Literature);

London, Whitechapel Art Gallery, Dutch Exhibition, 30 March – 10 May 1904, no. 411 (lent by Lewis Fry).

A comparable landscape by Berchem, unsigned but also on panel and of slightly larger dimensions, is in the collection of the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, formerly in the collection of Lt. Col. and Mrs. Wilfrid Martineau.¹ The Birmingham painting shares almost exactly the same group of figures and livestock, with only minor differences in the landscape and foliage.

¹ Inv. no. 1932P117; see C. Wright, Images of a Golden Age: Dutch Seventeenth-Century Paintings, Birmingham 1989, p. 275.