Barent Gael (1630/1635 - 1698), Couple Of Landscapes With Genre Scenes

Barent Gael (1630/1635 - 1698)

Couple of landscapes with genre scenes

(2) Oil on canvas, cm 33 x 40.5

With frame, cm 48 x 54.5

The two oil paintings on canvas are by the painter Baren Gael, born in Haarlem in 1630. Active at first in his father’s workshop, Gael is already registered with the local painters' guild in 1642, although the first part of his operatic corpus is not known. He was probably a pupil of Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668), who in turn owed money to Frans Hals (1582-1666) and Pieter Verbeck (1610-1654). From Wouwerman’s painting he broke free in the sixties of the century, as documented by A. Houbraken (De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantse Konstschilders... vol. 3, 1753). Part of the inspiration relating to the macchiettistico genre and representative formalism, also evident in the present paintings, came to Gael certainly from colleagues in Haarlem; he left this city between 1661 and 1673, when he reached Amsterdam, The artist continued his own plentiful production of peasant scenes in the manner of Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade. In continuity with the entire sixteenth-century Flemish production, Gael also proposes in this couple the dualism typical of the Dutch genre scenes, introducing on the one hand to the serenity of natural data, on the other hand to the tumultuous vivacity of life, Sometimes flanked by scenes of religious, love or small battle scenes. The artist stopped dating his works in 1681, even if it is wrong the historiographical belief of a time, that he was inactive at the easel between the eighties and nineties of the seventeenth century.