Catalogue entry no. 4 by William W. Robinson:
Nicolaes Berchem is best known as seventeenth-century Holland’s outstanding painter of Italianate landscapes, but his large and varied oeuvre also includes Dutch views, winter scenes, nocturnes, battles, Mediterranean harbors, and biblical and allegorical subjects. It is doubtful that Berchem ever crossed the Alps. He capitalized on the popularity of imagery that evoked the landscape, light, ancient ruins, and timeless pastoral life of the Italian campagna by adapting the compositional types and atmospheric effects he studied in works by Pieter van Laer, Jan Both, and Jan Asselijn, all of whom had spent time in Rome.
More than 350 drawings by Berchem have survived. Most represent landscapes, but he also produced attractive studies of figures and animals. While only a few are directly preparatory for his paintings and autograph etchings, models for prints executed by specialist engravers comprise a larger group of designs for works in other media. During the 1640s and early 1650s, Berchem etched his own plates with series of animals, and landscapes with herders and cattle, some of them based on figure studies and studies of animals from life. Around 1655, he temporarily gave up etching and began to collaborate with other printmakers for the purpose of publishing his compositions. Many of the prints after Berchem’s designs reproduce drawings from the middle of the 1650s.
The Harvard work provided the model for an etching by Cornelis Visscher, the third in a set of four upright landscapes with pastoral scenes (Fig. 1). Visscher, who executed eleven prints after Berchem, probably finished this suite shortly before his death in 1658. The drawing is partially incised to transfer the design to the plate, and the etching reproduces the composition in reverse. Berchem signed the drawing at the upper right, and in the corresponding space at the upper left of the print Visscher identified him as the designer (CBerghem Delinea) above his own signature (C. Visscher f.). Berchem’s models for two other prints in the set are known. The design for Shepherdess Riding on a Donkey, now in the Prentenkabinet der Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden, belonged, with the Harvard drawing, to the Amsterdam artist and collector Simon Fokke (1712– 1784) and appeared as the lot following it in his sale. The model for The Ford was on the art market in Germany in 2003. Like the Harvard work, both were executed in gray wash and black chalk and were partially incised to transfer the design.
Like many prints by and after Berchem, the etching after the Harvard drawing provided other artists with motifs for their compositions. The Haarlem painter Job Berckheyde used it as a point of departure for the design of a picture, and an anonymous Delftware decorator adapted the tree, cows, and figures for a ceramic plaque dated 1660.
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