Job Berckheyde, Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters

Job Berckheyde

1630 Haarlem - 1693 Haarlem

Winter Landscape with Ice Skaters

Oil on canvas (relined). 52 x 63 cm.

Signed lower left: Hiob Berckheyde. Certificate

Hans Friedrich Secker (former director of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum), Honnef, 22.7.1947 (only a copy of the certificate is existent). Provenance

Lempertz auction 418, Cologne, 5.-6.6.1942, lot 185. – German private collection.

Job was the elder brother of Gerrit Berckheyde and the two collaborated closely throughout their lives, possibly sharing a studio in Haarlem. Both brothers specialised in veduta painting, especially views of Dutch and Rhenish towns. Job also painted church interiors, a relatively new genre at the time, as well as, more rarely, winter landscapes. This image of ice skaters by a city wall is perhaps identical with a work by the artist sold at auction under the title "Een Winter, fraai geschildert door J. Berkheyden" by C. Elout auctioneers in Haarlem on 4.4.1780 as lot 25.

The signature with "H." as the first letter of the artist's name can also be seen on Berckheyde's 1675 self portrait in the Uffizi in Florence (inv. no. 1775).