(Antwerp 1683–1733)
A riding party taking refreshments in a river landscape,
oil on panel, 66 x 83.5 cm, framed

Provenance:
Collection of Prince and Princess Metternich, Wiesbaden, 1952;
Private European collection;
where acquired by the present owner

Exhibited:
San Francisco, Fine Arts Museums, 1952, as Philips Wouwerman (according to a label on the reverse)

Carel van Falens is today mostly known for adopting the tradition of Philips Wouwerman and bringing it into the eighteenth century, however, the influence of his time at the courts of Regent Philippe d’Orléans and the later Louis XV after he emigrated to Paris at the age of twenty, cannot be underestimated and certainly played a part in the development of his distinct talent.

The delicacy of light and subtlety of colour illustrated in the present painting was also evident in some of his greatest masterpieces, and helped to establish his name as an artist linked with representatives of Régence joie de vivre such as Lancret, Pater, Oudry, Desportes and in particular Antoine Watteau.

Van Falens began his artistic career working as an apprentice for the horse painter Constance Francken and was then accepted into the Académie Saint Luc in Paris as early as 1705 or 1706. The work that he submitted for entrance into the Académie was a Scène de chasse, which was later hung by the académiciens in the position of honour in the Salle d’assemblée, thus demonstrating how highly they regarded this artwork. During the Regency, the Duke d’Orléans commissioned van Falens to restore some of his paintings and after the Duke died he was named Peintre ordinaire du roi to Louis XV in 1724. In November of the same year, the artist was admitted to the Académie Royale, although sadly his time there was cut short when in 1733 he died in his apartment in the Louvre, at the age of forty-nine.