BARENT AVERCAMP (1612 Kampen 1679) Winter landscape... Lot 3037

BARENT AVERCAMP (1612 Kampen 1679) Winter landscape with skaters. Oil on panel. Monogrammed lower right: AV.DN. (ligature). 44.5 × 60.5 cm. Provenance: – Collection of P. P. Volkoff, Leningrad. – Collection of Mrs. N. Danzas, Leningrad, 1908–1909 (label verso). – Collection of S.K.H. Grand Duke Kyrill Wladimirowitsch Romanov (1876–1938), Leningrad. – Collection of Romer Williams, Worcester 1925. – With Bachstitz, The Hague. – E. Rössler, Berlin. – With Bachstitz, The Hague, 1935. – Collection of H. Maas, The Hague. – Sale Sotheby's, London, 3.12.1969, Lot 19 (as Barent Avercamp). – Swiss private collection. Exhibited: St Petersburg 1908: Starye Gody, Imperial Society for the encouragement of art, 20.11.1908–12.1.1909, no. 425. Literature: – Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, in: Monatshefte für Kunstwissenschaft 3, 1910, p. 118. – Cornelis Hofstede de Groot: Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten Holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, vol. VII, 1918, pp. 489–490, no. 527 (as perhaps by Avercamp, dated 1669 but produced 30 to 40 years earlier). – Willem Rudolf Juynboll, in: Oudheikundig Jaarboek 2, 1934, p. 149 (as Barent Avercamp). This atmospheric painting of skating figures was originally conceived as an oval (32 × 43 cm), and was later expanded into a rectangle to which was added the monogram of Aert van der Neer (1603–1677). As early as the 1910s, Hofstede de Groot expressed doubts about the attribution to Aert van der Neer and attributed the painting to Barent Avercamp, as did Willem Rudolf Juynboll. The figures and the rich detail in the costumes are characteristic of Barent Avercamp, as a comparison with the Winter Landscape in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. no. A3286) shows. The painting belonged to members of the Russian aristocracy at the beginning of the 20th century, among others the Grand Duke Cyril Vladimirovich Romanov (ill. 1), a grandson of Tsar Alexander II.