Willem Koekkoek (Dutch, 1839–1895) Lot n° 26

A Busy Street in a Dutch Town, Signed 'W. Koekkoek' bottom right, oil on canvas 33 x 48 3/4 in. (83.8 x 123.8cm)Sotheby's, London, sale of November 27, 1985, lot 182 (as Figures in the Market Square). Acquired directly from the above sale. MacConnal-Mason Gallery, London, United Kingdom. Acquired directly from the above. Private Collection, Virginia. NOTE: Willem Koekkoek was a member of one of the best known and most highly regarded families of realist painters in 19th century Holland. Born in Amsterdam, he was the grandson of Jan Hermanus Koekkoek (1778-1851), the son of Hermanus Koekkoek the Elder (1815-1882) and the brother of Johannes Hermanus Barend Koekkoek (1840-1912). Willem studied art under his father, a marine painter, and soon became one of the most distinguished painters in the country, best known for his extremely detailed town scenes that were inspired by his numerous trips to The Hague, Utrecht, and Nieuwer Amstel throughout the 1880s. Concentrating almost exclusively on Netherlandish townscapes, which he preferred to imagine rather than copy directly from nature, Koekkoek found a successful market for his work amongst the affluent middle class in the Netherlands and Great Britain, particularly in London, where the artist moved in 1888. The present lot, along with Lot 27, are two quintessential examples of the artist's body of work in the 1880s. A Busy Street in a Dutch Town, is particularly impressive because of its large size, but also because of Koekkoek's ability to capture the effervescence of a bustling town and to suggest a certain nostalgia, true to Holland's Age of Romanticism. We wish to thank the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, also known as R.K.D, for their kind assistance in cataloguing the present lot.