517 - Marten van VALCKENBORCH (Leuven, 1534 – Frankfurt, 1612)

Marten van VALCKENBORCH (Leuven, 1534 – Frankfurt, 1612) Allegory of Summer Oak panel, three planks, unparqueted H. 52 cm - W. 73 cm Signed and dated in the center 'MARTIN / VAN VALCKENBORGH FECIT 1599' Our painting was likely part of a series depicting two or four seasons, similar to the one presented at the Halifax auction (Christie’s, London, 1936), which was sold as a complete set and dated 1600—one year before our panel. Several winter landscapes are known in which the figures are rendered on the same scale as ours, as well as other allegories of summer whose compositions differ in each case; the one from the Halifax collection [1] depicts figures, while another in a private collection celebrates the harvest [2]. Our previously unpublished composition depicts a vast rural landscape, dotted with windmills in the distance, a village with its church, farms, and dwellings. On a body of water in the center of the painting, fishermen are pulling in their nets. Musicians and elegant couples dance and gather around a picnic. In the center of the foreground, a pilgrim resting has set down his staff and is being offered bread, while a shepherd and a cowherd tend to their herds. These rural and pastoral scenes are punctuated by wooded areas, whose depiction of foliage is characteristic of the artist. Born into a Dutch family of painters and the older brother of Lucas van Valckenborch (1535–1597), Marten was admitted to the Mechelen Painters’ Guild in 1559 and then settled in Antwerp in 1564. Political and religious unrest forced him to flee to Aachen in 1566 and then to Frankfurt, where he obtained citizenship in 1586. There, he opened and ran a thriving studio, where he worked with his brother and his son Frederick until his death in 1612. Building on the “invented seasons” themes of Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1528–1568), the artist painted vast panoramas—idyllic scenes of the Flemish countryside where the bluish horizons are reminiscent of the gouaches by his contemporary Hans Bol (1534–1593). [1] Christie’s London, November 12, 1936, lot no. 63 (Alexander Wied, Lucas and Marten van Valckenborch (1535–1597 and 1534–1612): The Complete Works with a Critical Catalog Raisonné, Lucas Verlag Frefren, 1990, pp. 263–267, nos. 31–34) [2] Wied, op. cit., pp. 246–247, no. 4.