LE COMMENCEMENT D’ORAGE, VARIOUSLY ATTRIBUTED TO REMBRANDT VAN RIJN AND PHILIPS DE KONINCK; IN THE COLLECTION OF LADY WANTAGE
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LARGER IMAGE
Before leaving this picture it would be useful to draw attention to the parallel rendering of several details—the trees and the sunlight hill in the background. Now in the second period of Rembrandt, which is tentatively placed by students as lying between 1640 and 1649, much attention to landscape is a prominent characteristic. Particularly was this the case with regard to his work with the needle. This culminated in the production of that most impressive of all his landscape etchings, The Three Trees. If that etching is compared with the present picture, many points of similarity will be observed, not only with regard to the extensive view on the left of that etching, but with regard to its realization and general feeling, beside which the art of de Koninck appears but a triviality. The Three Trees is dated 1643, and I am inclined to place this picture at about the same period, or at any rate between 1640 and 1643. With this date the technique is in strict consonance. Philips de Koninck we know was born in 1619, so that at this period he would be twenty-one, a very impressionable age, and I would hazard the suggestion, although the evidence is purely presumptive, that not only was this landscape the forerunner of The Three Trees, but that its production at the period when de Koninck was probably a pupil of Rembrandt, or at any rate had but just emerged from his studio, influenced the former to such an extent that it actually inspired his future landscapes, the similar character of which is so well known. Hence the importance of Le Commencement d’Orage for us. ¶ Yet another plea may be urged for the acceptance of the work as being by Rembrandt. It is an accepted fact, that the etchings of Hercules Seghers had great influence on Rembrandt. The inventory of his effects made in 1656 shows that he had in his possession six landscapes by Seghers in addition to the copper of Tobias and the Angel, which latter he reworked and it appears in Rembrandt’s work as the Flight into Egypt. Seghers, as is well known, was a lover of these vast Dutch plains seen from a height, as witness his flat Dutch landscape seen from a height with water in the foreground, and a flat Dutch landscape with a winding river. Now Seghers was born about 1590 and died somewhere about 1640, and it is fair to presume that at this latter date Rembrandt came into possession of the plate of Tobias and the Angel. This is the very period to which I attribute the production of Le Commencement d’Orage, and it is a noteworthy fact that prior to this date we have nothing akin to this and subsequent landscapes, so that it is fair to presume that the art of Seghers created the landscape art of Rembrandt as exemplified by The Three Trees and subsequent etchings, and through him the art of Philips de Koninck. ¶ Moreover the picture of Tobias and the Angel in the National Gallery is directly executed under the influence of Seghers, and I have already drawn attention to the similarity between the building of the sky in this picture and that of Lady Wantage’s. In view of these considerations it would seem that the champions of Philips de Koninck must show more adequate reasons before robbing Rembrandt of the authorship of this superb landscape.
EARLY STAFFORDSHIRE WARES
ILLUSTRATED BY PIECES IN THE BRITISH MUSEUM
❧ WRITTEN BY R. L. HOBSON ❧
ARTICLE I
IN beginning a series of articles on Staffordshire wares, which are intended to sketch the history of those fascinating old pieces now so eagerly sought by the collector of pottery, our first duty is to select a convenient starting point. It is improbable that in a county so rich in materials as Staffordshire the making of pottery has suffered any serious intermission since prehistoric times; but I think we may safely assume that the collector, as distinct from the antiquary, will feel little interest in any of the productions of this district prior to the seventeenth century. If we except Gothic paving tiles, a few of the better costrels or pilgrim’s bottles, and the mysterious ‘poteries gracieuses de la reine Elizabeth’ (which, whatever they are, no one thinks of claiming for Staffordshire), it may be said that for five centuries after the Norman conquest the ceramic art of this country boasted nothing better than coarse pitchers, gotches, gourds, and gorges of clumsy shape and uncouth ornament, which appeal to few but the sternest antiquarians. With the seventeenth century, however, begins a new period of development, very gradual at first, but full of interest. ¶ To anyone who has recently visited the Potteries, and seen the great conglomerate of towns intersected by railways and tramlines, with its forest of chimneys and the constantly burning kilns of numberless factories that supply the markets of the world, it is difficult to picture the same district 300 years ago, wooded, wild and picturesque. The great towns were then represented by a few moorland hamlets, the teeming factories by occasional ‘hovels’ and ‘sun-kilns,’ and the armies of workmen by the solitary potter, who, helped by one or two labourers or by his own household alone, threw, glazed and fired his weekly ovenload of crocks, which his wife took to town on a donkey to exchange for the necessaries of life. It is not a very promising picture from a collector’s point of view; and yet in the first few years of the seventeenth century and in circumstances little less primitive than those we have just described, a number of pieces were made that are now eagerly sought after by persons of taste. I need hardly say that it is not the common crocks made for the market or fair that have achieved this apotheosis. The vessels with which we are at present concerned were, we may be sure, of the kind ‘made for honour,’ tours de force to celebrate special occasions, and to be cherished among the heirlooms of the poor.
FIG. I.—Slipware Dish. Depth, 16 ins.
The Pelican in her Piety.