ALLART VAN EVERDINGEN, THE DRAWINGS - A Complete Catalogue, Including the Studies for Reynard the Fox

aetas aurea xxi

Alice I. Davies

2007. 4to. 504 pages, containing an Introduction, the main text comprising of 12 chapters, an extensive bibliography and indexes; 756 illustrations, from which 10 are in colour. Bound in cloth with dust jacket.

ISBN 90 70288 97 4

Allart van Everdingen, born at Alkmaar in 1621, launched his career as a landscape and marine specialist at Haarlem in the 1640s, then moved to Amsterdam in 1652 where he was active as a painter, printmaker, draftsman and art dealer up to his death in 1675. He was renowned in his day for the Scandinavian subjects he depicted following his trip to Norway and Sweden in 1644.

This catalogue of Everdingen's drawings presents 670 authentic water colors, ink drawings and oil sketches on paper in comprehensive, illustrated entries. The accompanying text explores many facets of his activity as a draftsman, including his use of paper, and also discusses later collectors of his sheets, their marks and inscriptions, and many imitations and copies of the master's drawing extant today. High points from Everdingen's production include his trip sketches (both from his travels to Scandinavia and from a trip he made to the Ardennes in 1656), his masterworks showing Dutch scenery, his allegorical series (Twelve Month, Four Seasons and Four Elements) and his studies and transfer drawings for both his Scandinavian landscape etchings and the prints he made to illustrate the fable Reynard the Fox.

The volume is an important reference work for all those with a general interest in seventeenth-century Dutch landscape and old master drawings, or with a particular interest in allegorical landscape subjects, book illustration or the Reynard the Fox fable.

The author, Alice I. Davies, published an Everdingen monograph and catalogue of the artist's paintings (in collaboration with Frederik J. Duparc) in 2001. Her other publications includes a book on the life and work of Jan van Kessel (1641-1680) and a catalogue of the 16th- and 17th-century Dutch and Flemish paintings at the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. She was an editor of Shop Talk, the 1995 Festschrift in honor of Seymour Slive.