ALLART VAN EVERDINGEN - First Painter of Scandinavian Landscape

aetas aurea xv

Alice I. Davies

& Frederic J. Duparc

2001. 4to. 312 pp. text and 467 plts. and ills. (14 in color). Cloth bound with dustjacket

ISBN 90 70288 27 3

This study of Allart van Everdingen (1621-1675) draws particular attention to his significant contribution to the history of art as the earliest painter of the landscape of Scandinavia. A native of Alkmaar, Everdingen started out painting marines in the Porcellis-de Vlieger tradition. His only known indigenous landscape from his first period is a dunescape in the style of his reputed teacher Pieter Molijn. In 1644 he traveled to Norway and Sweden where he made sketches of several identified sites. After his return to the Netherlands he specialized in Nordic scenes, characterized by craggy mountains and crashing waterfalls, quiet fjords or rivers, huge boulders, fir trees, and log cabins. Here, the influence of his second-named teacher Roelant Savery is discernible in the earliest works. These paintings were eagerly collected by his countrymen and emulated by other artists, most significantly by Holland's leading landscape painter Jacob van Ruisdael, who himself had no direct experience with the foreign subjects being portrayed.

Everdingen lived in Haarlem from 1645 to 1652, and then moved to Amsterdam, where he remained for the rest of his life. (Ruisdael made the same move four or five years later.) His largest known commission was for six or seven pictures used to decorate the Trippenhuis, built in 1660-1662, at Amsterdam.

By and large, this monograph text is a revision of the author's Harvard dissertation (1973; published in 1978), with the artist's biography substantially enlarged. The examination of his imitators and followers is expanded to include his pupil Gerard Edema, who was active in England before ca.1700, as well as many other artists in the Dutch, Germanic, and Scandinavian schools up to 1850.

The catalogue raisonné of Everdingen's paintings is a collaborative effort by Alice I. Davies and Frederic J. Duparc. Like the chapters treating the painter's career in the monograph, the catalogue of the 179 authentic works is organized by subject - 22 marines, 146 Scandinavian landscapes, and 11 Netherlandish landscapes - with the dated pictures listed first and the remainder presented in chronological order. The other three sections comprise 22 "attributed paintings" not yet examined at firsthand by the authors, 35 "rejected paintings" in public collections, and 5 paintings lost from public collections, for which no reproduction exists. All of the catalogue entries, save the five in the last section, are reproduced in black and white plates (14 also in color). In addition, many of the artist's drawings and etchings appear among the 231 comparative illustrations that accompany the monograph text.

The 1709 sale catalogue of Everdingen's painting collection is duplicated in an appendix. Complete bibliographies and indexes also make this a definitive reference book.