(Rotterdam circa 1609–1685 Utrecht)
A Rhenish river landscape with figures uploading barges,
signed with monogram and dated lower left: HS/ 1669,
oil on panel, 47.1 x 63.2 cm, framed

Provenance:
probably Carlos Blacker collection, Paris, 1900

Herman Saftleven is particularly well known for his Rhenish landscapes and the present panel painting is a fine example of one of these pictures. Although the scenery in this painting is very similar to that of the Rhine valley, it was more likely to have been imagined by the artist, rather than copied directly from nature.

Saftleven began painting these fanciful Rhineland views in the late 1640s and continued in this vein for the next twenty or thirty years. His interest in this type of scenery is likely to have been influenced by the trips that he made into the Rhinelands. As early as 1644 he visited the eastern Dutch province of Gelderland and he then made another journey to the eastern Netherlands in 1651 when he travelled to Arnhem and Cleve and then down the Rhine to Bingen. Saftleven made a number of sketches during these trips, which he then used as motifs to create the large-scale, finished drawings and paintings that he produced in the studio. The Atlas Blaeu, which is the National Library in Vienna, holds some of his best topographical drawings of the Rhinelands, brought to the library from circa 1663-66 by the Amsterdam lawyer, Laurens van Hem. These drawings were usually topographically accurate, whilst the paintings that Saftleven produced were not and instead combined actual motifs with imaginary settings. There appears to have been a strong market for these kind of pictures; with their depictions of the picturesque and rocky shores of the lower Rhine, these paintings must have felt very different and exotic to the Dutchman used to soaring skies and flat terrain.

Saftleven was strongly influenced by the advice of some of the foremost art theorists of his time. Karl van Mander was one such theorist who, in 1604, wrote a treatise entitled Schilderboeck (Book of Painting), which advised that young painters should get up early and go into the countryside with their sketchbooks and draw from nature. He suggested that when they returned to the studio they should use their imaginations to transform the true to life drawings into paintings. In this way, Karl van Mander followed the belief that the artist’s role was to improve upon natural appearances by the imaginative combination of different elements from nature. Samuel van Hoogstraten also shared this sentiment in his book of 1678 entitled Inleyding tot de Hooge Schoole der der Schilderkonst (Introduction to the High School of the Art of Painting).