JOHANNES LINGELBACH
Frankfurt-am-Main 1622 – 1674 Amsterdam
Figures dancing the Tarantella outside an inn in a hilly landscape
Oil on canvas
109 x 90 cms
Signed lower left: J: Lingelbach
PROVENANCE:
Sale: Amsterdam, 17 April, 1759, no. 6;
Sale: Jon. Verkolje, Amsterdam, 24 October, 1763, no. 3;
M. van der Pot, Rotterdam;
Verstolk van Soelen, The Hague;
Sale: Verstolk, Amsterdam, 28 June, 1846;
Presumably Sir Thomas Baring, 2nd Bt;
Sir Francis Baring, 3rd Bt. and 1st Baron Northbrook;
Thomas George Baring, 1st Earl Northbrook;
With P. & D. Colnaghi, London 1936;
With Gallery Müller, Buenos Aires;
Where purchased by a private collector, 11th July 1944;
Then by descent to the daughter;
Sale: Sotheby’s 12th December 1990, lot 89, ‘Property of a Lady’;
Private Collection, New York;
On loan to the Israel Museum, Jerusalem 1995-2004
LITERATURE:
G.F. Waagen, Treasures of Art in Great Britain…, 1854, vol.II, P.186: “A Landscape with country people; a couple dancing; of rare delicacy of tone for this master, and very careful execution”;
Descriptive Catalogue of the Collection of…the Earl of Northbrook. 1889, no.69;
W. Bernt, The Netherlandish Painters of the Seventeenth Century, 1970, vol II, fig. 690;
C. Burger-Wegener, Johannes Lingelbach Dissertation University of Berlin 1976, no. 116, p. 202
EXHIBITIONS:
On loan to the Israel Museum of Art, Jerusalem 1995 – 2004
This is a superb example of Lingelbach’s Italianate genre painting. The figures are dancing the traditional Italian courtship dance - the Tarantella. They have been painted with great delicacy, and on the far left of composition it has been suggested that the innkeeper is a self-portrait of the artist.
The picture may be compared with another Lingelbach composition, also upright, in the Mauritshuis, The Hague [see H.R.Hoetink (ed.), The Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, 1985, p. 393, no.951, reproduced], in which peasants resting outside a doorway to the left are seen before an extensive southern landscape. The sparsely foliated tree, in the centre of the present composition, is moved to the right of the Mauritshuis picture to act as a framing element. The Mauritshuis painting is generally dated to the late 1650s; the present painting is probably a little later.
