Landscape At Setting Sun Lively With Skaters. Aert Van Der Neer (1603-1677)

Dutch School of the 17th century. Signed with the monogram "AVDN" on a tree trunk, lower right. Oil on canvas Presented in a beautiful old blackened wooden frame with inverted profile and wavy moldings. Total dimensions with its frame: 78 x 101 cm. The frame: 52.5 x 74.5 cm Aert van der Neer, Dutch painter of the “golden century” (Amsterdam 1603/1604 – id. 1677). Despite a certain prolificacy! We have very little information about the life of this landscaper who calls himself the “Painter of the Night”. He is one of the first artists in the Netherlands to have applied an original chiaroscuro to the landscape, both contrasting and very colorful, where the slate grays of the nocturnals contrast with a yellow light ranging from light to red. He remained famous for his seascapes and moonlit landscapes executed with sensitivity and poetry. He strives to render cloudy skies in silvery tones. He plays with lighting effects. The sun's rays are reflected in the calm expanse of water at the edge of which a few village houses seem to sleep and the rhythm of the mills hangs. In his paintings, very often of the same format, the expanse of clear water and two-thirds of sky leave little room for the strips of land to which houses, boats and trees or bushes cling. The Dutch biographer, Arnold Houbraken tells us that he was a butler in a family in Gorinchem before opening an inn in Amsterdam in 1659 which he had to close in 1662. His oldest known painting is a genre scene, dated 1632 , when he settled in Amsterdam. He would thus only have devoted himself to painting late in life, unless he had already been a student of Camphuysen c. 1626. ? If his first winter views with skaters are inspired by this master and especially by Avercamp, the chronology of his other landscapes is poorly known and very few of them are dated. Misunderstood by his contemporaries (like many other painters), his paintings were not very popular because they went off the beaten track; Posterity has done him justice, because his works are now exhibited in the greatest museums: (Rijksmuseum; Avignon museum; Copenhagen, SM f. K.; Hamburg, Kunsthalle; London, NG; Montpellier museum; Louvre; Rotterdam, BVB), his Sunsets (Kassel Museum; Mauritshuis; Hermitage; London, NG; Louvre; Paris, Petit Palais) and his Sunrises (Mauritshuis). Aert also left Winter Landscapes which recall Avercamp and G. Van de Velde (Amiens Museum; Rijksmuseum; Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum; Brussels, MRBA; Mauritshuis; Hermitage; London, NG; Munich, Alte Pin. ; Vienna, KM) and Nocturnal Fires (Brussels, MRBA; Copenhagen, SM f. K.; Moscow, Pushkin Museum). Provenance: Berlin Gallery around 1920, then private collection in the United States. Literature: C. Hofstede de Groot, Catalog raisonné of the works of the most eminent Dutch painters of the 17th century, vol. VII, 1923. W. Schulz, Aert van der Neer, 2002 Good state of conservation. Sold with invoice & certificate of expertise