Scholarly Article

Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: View of an Italian Port, early 1660s

Part of Online Edition: Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century

Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.

Publication History

Published online April 24, 2014

A man and woman on horseback are on a strip of land also occupied by livestock, dogs, and seven other people in front of a body of water and towering cliff in this horizontal landscape painting. The couple on horseback is in the lower left quadrant of the composition, and they both have pale, peach-toned skin. The man’s silvery-white horse pulls its head down and back toward its front legs, mouth open. The man sits with one hand holding the reins and the other planted on his hip, palm facing out. He wears a white cloth tied around his neck, a tan-colored jacket, loose, nickel-gray pants, knee-high brown boots, and a wide-brimmed, peanut-brown hat with plumes of mauve-purple feathers. The man has shoulder-length, dark, curly hair and a goatee. A curved horn hangs from a strap looping across his torso, and a scarlet-red cloth is bunched over the saddle. Behind the white horse, the woman’s brown horse faces us. The woman wears a dark yellow dress with white sleeves and a white cloth along the neckline. Her hair is loose under a wide-brimmed, brown hat with dark yellow and white feathers. A falcon perches on her glove-covered hand. The mounted man talks to another man who stands next to the white horse. That man also has peach-toned skin, holds a lance, and wears a dark, royal-purple coat. A clean-shaven, pale-skinned young man sits and hunches toward two dogs at his feet in the lower left corner of the picture. Two more men wearing long robes stand a short distance away behind the boy. One has their back to us and the other, facing us, has dark brown skin and wears a turban. He holds one hand out, palm up. The person on this side sits in a boat near the left edge of the painting, looking off in that direction. He has dark, peach-colored skin and also wears a turban and robe. Six dogs spaced across the picture from the left edge to the mounted couple have brown or black fur with white spots. In the lower right corner of the composition, a person wearing tattered brown and red clothes sits facing away from us next to a cow and two sheep, all of whom lie down. The cow looks in our direction, head held low. Three goats mill about, and two sheep lie in a pile by the water’s edge as two men coax another goat onto a rowboat already laden with at least two cows. A two-masted sailing ship sits askance in low water to the right. A sailboat edges into the scene from the right edge, and a ship with sails unfurled sails near the cliff face to the right. That rocky outcropping comes almost halfway across the picture and is painted in tones of earthy brown and marine blue. Blocky structures along the top of the outcropping are hazy in the distance. The body of water stretches back to the horizon, where there are more outcroppings on the right and a church tower on the left. Mounds of white, puffy clouds against a vivid blue sky fill the top three-quarters of the composition behind the rock formations. — Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem, View of an Italian Port, early 1660s, oil on canvas, Gift of Robert H. and Clarice Smith, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art, 1990.62.1

Entry

In this idyllic scene, Berchem captures both the beauty of the Italian landscape and the cool, crystalline light that imbues it with its distinctive atmospheric quality. Situated against a backdrop of towering cliffs that drop straight down to the calm waters below, the exotic character of this harbor setting is defined not by buildings or wharfs but by the various types of figures that have come together at the water’s edge. The most prominent of these is the elegant couple who, fresh from the hunt, sit astride their steeds. Wearing wide-brimmed hats with flowing feathers, they talk to a standing gentleman while the woman’s falcon airs its wings. The gentleman holding his staff is probably the keeper of the hunting dogs that are seen mingling, two of them being held by a young assistant in the lower left. What has brought them to the harbor is not clear, but they may well be awaiting a ferry to transport them either to one of the ships anchored in deeper water or to the far shore. Behind them two wide-bottomed ferries are already loaded with cargo. In the one filled with cattle, two figures wrestle a recalcitrant goat along a gangplank, while before the other ferry two men in Oriental dress stand and talk, while a third sits in the boat, waiting for it to push off. In the right foreground, a shepherd tending to a cow and some sheep also awaits transport.

Although no documentary evidence exists that proves that Berchem actually visited Italy, it seems probable that he traveled there sometime between 1653 and 1656, because it is highly unlikely that he could otherwise have captured the special light and character of this faraway land with such seeming effortlessness. While View of an Italian Port does not represent an identifiable location, such details as the characteristic Italian ship anchored offshore, with its long red oars stretching out to either side, point to Berchem’s careful observation of what, for a Dutchman, was an unusual type of vessel. Just where Berchem might have seen such cliffs is not known, but similar formations surmounted by large buildings appear in the background of a number of his paintings. Comparable cliffs can be seen in paintings by other artists, as in Coastal Landscape by Moonlight, attributed to Aelbert Cuyp, in the Six Collection, Amsterdam.

As with most of his Italianate paintings, Berchem executed View of an Italian Port in the Netherlands, probably in the early 1660s. He painted for a Dutch clientele eager for idealized views of the Italian landscape. Judging from the various copies of this painting, the work struck a responsive chord. Its qualities were greatly admired in the mid-eighteenth century, when the image was engraved in 1753 by A. Delfos, and in the early nineteenth century, when the first written descriptions of it appeared. In the 1831 catalog of the famous collection of Chevalier Érard, for example, the catalog entry reads in part: “One admires in this painting . . . all the taste, [and] all the spirit of the celebrated Berchem. Its composition is appointed, [and] its groups are arranged and varied with much thought; air circulates everywhere, [and] the recession into space is perfect. The execution, [and] the preservation leave nothing to be desired.”

The classicism of this painting, with its strong horizontal and vertical accents in the landscape and the clear, crystalline light, compellingly places the work in the 1660s. The fluidity of Berchem’s brushwork and the elegance of the couple on horseback are also consistent with this date. A comparison of View of an Italian Port to another harbor scene by Berchem, Coastal Scene with Crab Catchers , datable to about 1658, demonstrates the evolution in style that Berchem’s work underwent between the late 1650s and early 1660s. Although one encounters a comparable contrast between foreground figures and a distant vista of cliffs across a body of water in the earlier work, the foreground and background elements are not so closely integrated as they are in the Gallery’s painting, while the distinctions of light and color are more pronounced. Another comparative work is Berchem’s Wild Boar Hunt , signed and dated 1659, where a similar grouping of figures on horseback occurs. While the position of the white horse in both paintings is virtually identical, the horse in the Gallery’s painting is somewhat more schematically rendered, which is characteristic of Berchem’s style of the 1660s.

Technical Summary

The support, a medium-weight, plain-weave fabric, is loosely woven of irregularly spun threads. Part of the original tacking margins were retained at the time of lining and incorporated into the picture plane, slightly expanding the dimensions on all four sides. Lining has reinforced the weave texture.

Paint is applied over an off-white ground in thin opaque layers worked wet over dry. Minor losses are confined to the edges. The upper right corner of the sky is abraded, as are the edges. No treatment has been undertaken at the National Gallery.