Sotheby's Old Masters Evening Sale London | 05 Dec 2018, 07:00 PM | L18036 LOT 13 THE PROPERTY OF A PRIVATE COLLECTOR JACOB ISAACKSZ. VAN RUISDAEL HAARLEM 1628/9 - 1682 AMSTERDAM A HAARLEMPJE: A PANORAMIC VIEW OF HAARLEM AND THE BLEACHING FIELDS SEEN FROM THE NORTH-WEST signed lower left: JvRuisdael oil on canvas 53.5 x 67.5 cm.; 21 1/8 x 26 5/8 in. ESTIMATE 1,500,000-2,000,000 GBP PROVENANCE Possibly Le Bas Courmont sale, Paris, 1792; Héris of Brussels, acting for Colonel Biré; By whom sold, Paris, Paillet, 25–26 March 1841, lot 20, for 6,750 Francs; Tardieu and others sale, Paris, Drouot, 4 February 1851, lot 19, for 5,800 Francs to Le Roy; Théodore Patureau; His sale, Paris, Drouot, 20–21 April 1857, lot 29, for 9,700 Francs; Maurice Kann (1840–1891), Paris; With F. Kleinberger, Paris and New York, 1913; August Cornelius de Ridder (1837–1911), Villa Schönberg, Cronberg-im-Taunus; Marcus Kappel (1839–1919), Berlin, by 1914; His grandson, Dr Gerhart Noah, Berlin; By inheritance to his cousin, Walther Rathenau, Berlin; Ernst (later Ernest) G. Rathenau, Berlin and from 1938 New York; Left by Rathenau for safekeeping with his cousin Dr F.J. Sedlmayr in 1939; From whom seized by the occupying German forces in Amsterdam and bought through Mühlmann by Hitler on 15 February 1941 for the Führer Museum in Linz (inv. no. 1436); Recovered via the Munich Collecting Point where registered on 15 July 1945 (no. 4336), and transferred to the Dutch authorities on 29 March 1946; Stichting Nederlands Kunstbezit, inv. no. 621; Returned in 1947 to Ernest G. Rathenau, New York (d. 1986), and his sister Ellen Ettlinger Rathenau, Oxford (d. 1994), although not formally received and signed for by them until 19th March 1951, together with a view of Amsterdam by Jan van der Heyden, possibly because they had been on exhibition; Sold by their heirs to Otto Naumann, New York; With Noortman Master Paintings, Maastricht; By whom sold to the present owner before 2004. EXHIBITED Paris, Musée du Jeu de Paume, Exposition rétrospective des grands et petits maîtres hollandais, April 1911, no. 147; Probably on loan with the rest of the De Ridder collection to the Städel in Frankfurt in 1911; Probably exhibited with the rest of the De Ridder collection in the New York gallery of Francois Kleinberger, 24 November – 15 December 1913; Exhibited in unnamed US museums by the Dutch government in 1947 (according to a letter written by Ernst Rathenau in that year, staing that he had already offered the Ruisdael and a Van der Heyden to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, on loan from Ernest G. Rathenau and Ellen Rathenau Ettlinger, 1951–1995 (inv. no. L.51.35.2, always as Ruisdael). LITERATURE C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné..., vol. IV, London 1912, p. 35, no. 88 (as Ruisdael, staffage ascribed to Adriaen van de Velde); W. Martin, 'Ausstellung altholländischer Bilder in Pariser Privatbesitz', in Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft, vol. 4, 1911, p. 506 (as not by Ruisdael); F. Kleinberger, 150 Old Masters, Paris and New York 1911, no. 63, reproduced; W. von Bode, Katalog Sammlung Kappel, Berlin 1914, no. 27 (as Ruisdael); J. Rosenberg, Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin 1928, p. 75, no. 42 (as Ruisdael, figures by Lingelbach); Catalogue Looted Paintings, no. 38; J. Giltay, 'De tekeningen van Jacob van Ruisdael', in Oud Holland, vol. 94, nos 2–3, 1980, p. 161 (probably doubtful as by Ruisdael, his doubts based on those of Martin, not on first-hand inspection); S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael, exh. cat., Amsterdam 1981, p. 219, under no. 88 (as by Ruisdael, not sharing Giltay's doubts); JL. Edwards, Alexandre-Joseph Paillet. Expert et marchand de tableaux à la fin du XVIIIe siècle, Paris 1996, p. 282; S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael, New Haven and London 2001, p. 621, dub20, reproduced (as perhaps by Ruisdael, an early Haarlempje from the first half of the 1660s or even earlier, with figures attributable to Lingelbach); also p. 59, under no. 59 and p. 543, under no. D67; S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, exh. cat., New Haven and London 2005, p. 220, under no. 91. CATALOGUE NOTE We see the distant city of Haarlem on a breezy summer’s afternoon from the dunes to the north-west of the city, looking across the low-lying bleaching fields. This is a Haarlempje, a genre that belongs to Ruisdael, in which he celebrated his native city and its setting in a series of painted panoramas done throughout the 1 1660s and the first half of the 1670s. They are widely regarded as among his finest achievements. Nearly all of Ruisdael’s Haarlempjes depict the city from the north-west and north for the simple reason that the elevation of the dunes in these directions from the city affords the best array of sites from which to view it in panorama due to the sparser trees – the region to the west being more thickly wooded.2 Ruisdael also painted views from the heights of the same dunes, but looking north, and he also painted views of Alkmaar, a city further north, that are very similar in style and mood to his Haarlempjes. The expression Haarlempje appears to date from Ruisdael’s lifetime, since it occurs in an inventory drawn up in 1669, and it has been used ever since. Ruisdael was not the first artist to make panoramic views of Haarlem seen from afar: his most famous predecessor was Rembrandt, for example in his famous 1651 etching The Goldweigher’s Field; but in a series of some twenty known paintings, most done after he had moved to Amsterdam, he catechised his native city. Despite the modest scale of all of them, Ruisdael’s Haarlempjes give an overwhelming sense of monumentality. This is partly to do with the skies – different in each work – which are as much his subject as the distant city dominated by the towering bulk of the Sint Bavo church. In this painting, towering cumulus clouds are swept across the picture plane from the west by the driving westerly wind coming off the North Sea outside the picture plane to the right (if the viewer were to turn 90 degrees to the right from the present viewpoint, he would probably be able to see the sea, or at least catch the reflection of the westering sun on the wave-tops). The meteorology is borne out by the patterns of slanting late afternoon direct sun passing between the clouds, illuminating parts of the city and the west façade of the Sint Bavo, shining on the luminous green of the bleaching fields, well-watered by the Atlantic weather and the springs emerging from beneath the dunes, catching the tops of the oak trees in the more fertile land that lies between the dunes and the bleaching fields, and accentuating the paler colour of the exposed sand of the dunes in the foreground. Meanwhile other parts of the panoramic view are cast into deep contrasting shadow by the clouds, setting up a network of contrasts. Ruisdael used warm and cool colours, 3 not merely light and dark tones, to capture the patterns of light and shade across the panoramic view. His favoured time of year in many of his paintings of diverse subjects – late summer or early autumn, when the heat of the summer has darkened the foliage of deciduous trees such as oaks – aided him in his task. In some Haarlempjes the uppermost leaves of some trees are showing signs of turning brown, but in this one, only the stunted wind-blown oak shrub on the top of the dune in the foreground, where the sandy soil is at its thinnest and driest, has succumbed to the changing of the season. In the compositions of all of Ruisdael’s Haarlempjes, and indeed all his other landscapes, the artist has taken a degree of artistic licence in his use of topography, which was for him a servant, not a master. Ruisdael did not rely, like James Joyce of Dublin, on his memory of Haarlem and environs from his youth there. A small group of black chalk drawings by Ruisdael, consistent in scale and technique, probably come from the same sketchbook that he made in the environs of Haarlem. They all have a higher horizon line than the paintings, and the skies are blank. One of them, at the Bredius Museum, The Hague, corresponds fairly closely with the 4 present picture, as Jeroen Giltay noted (fig. 1). The viewpoint is not exactly the same: the group of farm buildings in the middle-ground appear in direct alignment with the Sint Bavo church, for example, but it seems highly likely that Ruisdael used the Bredius drawing as an aide-memoire for this Haarlempje, as other sheets served for other Haarlempjes. As Slive observed, the viewpoint of the drawing – and by extension of the present painting – is Het Kopje in the dunes near Bloemendaal. Visible in several other Haarlempjes is the house to the left amid trees with prominent chimneys at each end of the roof: this is Hartelust, a country house built by Michiel de Wael, who had owned the nearby bleaching fields, and who is portrayed in two of 5 Frans Hals’ Schutterstukken or civic group portraits. Beyond it and slightly to its right, bordered by the bleaching fields, are the ruins of the castle of Huis ter Kleef, destroyed by the Spanish in 1573, and a landmark familiar to every Haarlemmer.