836. A VIEW IN HOLLAND.
Philip de Koninck (Dutch: 1619-1688).
Koninck, or Koning, was born at Amsterdam and became a pupil of Rembrandt. He painted historical subjects and portraits, but it is for his landscapes that he is now most admired. These are generally expansive views in which aerial perspective is well given: "The distances of the painters of the older schools had been full of objects and figures as minutely rendered as those on the foremost places, only ever so much smaller. Compare with these distances the simply treated expanse of country offered to view in P. de Koninck's landscapes. Here we do not have merely a series of objects getting smaller as they recede, but a far more generalised representation of the whole face of nature bathed in an atmosphere in which objects are lost to view" (Baldwin Brown's Fine Arts, p. 301).
There is a repetition of this picture in the Royal Museum at the Hague. One may presume that Koninck's pictures had aristocratic purchasers; for, unlike the painters of "pastoral landscape," he is fond of introducing persons of distinction—here it is a hawking party; in 974 a carriage-and-six with outriders.