JOHANNES GLAUBER called Polidoro
Utrecht 1646 – Schoonhoven 1726

Landscape with bather beside a pool

Oil on Canvas
166 by 110 cm

Johannes Glauber was one of the most travelled Dutch artists. He studied with Berchem in Amsterdam in 1660s before leaving for Rome in 1671, where he became close friends with Karel du Jardin. Together with Jacob de Heusch and Jan Frans van Bloeman he became a leader in the ‘third generation’ of Dutch Italianate landscape painters. Having worked all over Europe including Paris, Venice, Padua and Copenhagen, where his patron was Count Ulrik Gyldenlove, in 1684 he returned to Amsterdam where he was to share a house with Gerard de Lairesse. They were to work together on many commissions.

Lairesse often painted the figures of Glauber’s landscapes and in turn he provided landscape backdrops for many of Lairesse’s history paintings. Their popularity in the late seventeenth century is evidence of the Dutch taste for style of academic classicism that was so heavily influenced by Claude, Poussin and Dughet. Whilst the 19thcentury description on the stretcher suggests Lairesse is responsible for the figures in this work, this seems unlikely in comparison to known collaborations by the artists [see the pair of landscapes in Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Copenhagen]. The fact that this is one of the few works Glauber signed suggests the work is wholly autograph.

Glauber’s debt to Poussin is particularly evident in how he combines the themes of landscape and narrative. Along with Lairesse Glauber was a member of the classicizing literary society Nil Volentibus Arduum. They would study original texts to find new and correct interpretations of subjects for their paintings. It was in preference to looking solely at earlier artist’s interpretations. Their aim is summed up in Lairesse’s Het Groot Schilderboek ‘the goal of the artist should be twofold: to educate and enlighten the art lover through the beautiful representation of a didactic tale and to amuse the scholar through a sensitive and accurate depiction of a familiar theme’

JOHANNES GLAUBER called Polidoro
Utrecht 1646 – Schoonhoven 1726

Landscape with Diana returned from the hunt at rest with her Nymphs
Oil on Canvas
62.5 by 77.2 cm

Signed Lower Right: GLAUBER

SOLD