(Antwerp 1662–1749 Rome) and (Antwerp 1657-before 1720)
Landscape with resting voyagers
oil on canvas, 95 x 129.5 cm, framed

We are grateful to Giancarlo Sestieri for confirming the attribution and his help in cataloguing the present lot.

The two van Bloemen brothers, Pieter and Jan Frans, arrived in Rome towards the end of the 1670s, after Lyon. Pieter entered the circle of Adriaen van der Cabel and was joined there by his younger brother. Both quickly established themselves; Pieter essentially as an ‘animal painter’ and Jan Frans as a ‘landscapist’. Van Bloemen senior returned home in 1693, after a residence in Rome of more than twenty years. It is not possible to establish the actual start of their activities in Rome with precision, but it is more than reasonable to assume that in the early years there, they worked in collaboration. This is already considered by Andrea Busiri Vici, who in his monograph on “L’Orizzonte” – this the nickname given Jan Frans – published in 1974 (see A. Busiri Vici, Jan Frans van Bloemen e l’origine del paesaggio romano settecentesco, Rom 1974, p. 7-8), wrote that the two brothers worked ‘side by side, in perfect agreement and affection, for about seven years’. This suggestion was based on several collaborative works he traced.

Among these works is a significant and representative group for the Sacra Congregazione di Propaganda Fide in Rome, which together with some similar landscapes belonging to Galleria Doria and the Cassa di Risparmio di Roma, opens the catalogue raisonné (see A. Busiri Vici, op. cit., 1974, nos. 1-13).

The present landscape gives us a significant confirmation of such cooperation, as the two horses and the man walking on the path who leads them, as well as the dog, perfectly reflect the unique manner of Pieter, rendered with his equally typical painterly manner, based on bright tones. This raises the hypothesis that the central group of trees, with the two large split trunks and the other two stunted and twisted, themselves the legacy of the decisive influence of Salvator Rosa, may also be in his hand, in view of the taste underlying their analytical execution in the face of the pure Flemish style adopted for their almost looming forms, which contrasts with the calmer and more relaxed spirit of interpretation characteristic of Jan Frans.

The latter was certainly responsible for all of the remaining composition, given its general inventiveness, as well as the broad and pasty ductus of the thick foliage and the landscape with a glimpse of buildings, in which emerge direct references to ancient Roman remains, heralding new evolutions in the taste of the new leader of Roman eighteenth-century landscape. The picture offers an Arcadian and bucolic vision, but always underlain with direct inspiration from nature, the result of careful study of the work of Gaspard Dughet as well as his early Flemish training.