Adam van Pynacker
(1620 - 1673) |
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Landscape, Classic Landscape Art Work
| Name: |
Adam van Pynacker |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Schiedam |
| Nationality: |
Dutch |
| Birth: |
1620 |
| Death: |
1673 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Landscape, Classic Landscape |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Dutch Golden Age |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| Ranked among the most gifted and romantic of the Italianate landscape painters, Pynacker is also regarded as one of the most original, approaching his subject with a fresh eye and a firm grasp of form. Little is actually known about him. Recent scholarship establishes his birth in Schiedam, not Pynacker, as was previously noted. A document of 1652 states that he was thirty-one in that year, making 1620 a likely birth year. He was probably first taught by his father, Christiaen Pynacker, a glass painter. Houbraken* states that Pynacker sojourned in Italy (ca. 1645 to 1648), a trip not yet confirmed by other evidence. Pynacker was recorded in Delft in 1649, where he must have known members of the Delft school, in particular Pieter van Asch. From 1654 to 1655 Pynacker was employed at the Brandenberg court at Lenzen. His Landscape with a Hunter (signed and dated 1654, Berlin, Staatliche Museen) survives from that sojurn. He was noted in Schiedam in 1658. Besides his visits to Delft (we have no real evidence that he lived there), Pynacker was married in Dantumadeel, Friesland, in 1658 to Eva de Geest, daughter of the portrait painter Wybrand de Geest (1592-ca. 1661). Adam's son and daughter were baptized in Schiedam in 1660 and 1661. Like other painters of Italianate landscape, he was drawn to Amsterdam and was there by 1661; he died there in 1673. Documents locate him there in 1669 and again in 1671. His last known painting is dated 1670, when he was recorded once more in Schiedam. Jan Asselijn is considered the influence for Pynacker's coastal scenes, but Jan Both is regarded as his major inspiration. Yet he absorbed both influences into an original style wherein vigorously conceived forms are artfully and dynamically laid out before the viewer. Pynacker's forest and harbor scenes are bathed in the warm Italianate light derived from in Both's work; Pynacker's personal contribution came in the crisply detailed vegetation generally found in the foreground of his pictures. He is one of the leading figure draftsmen among landscape painters, and his treatment of light and atmosphere are greatly admired. To some critics, Pynacker's finest period falls before 1660; to others, it comes after his arrival in Amsterdam, when his style undergoes a dramatic transformation. Owing to an absence of dated works, however, an exact chronology is hard to establish. Moreover, certain elements such as animals, boats, and vegetation were recombined in various pictures to create diverse compositions. Nonetheless, some changes can be detected among the pictures that are dated. A good example of bis work before 1660 is Landscape with Hunter (dated 1654, Berlin). To this same period are grouped a number of atmospheric coastal scenes as well as his View of a Harbor (Los Angeles, Carter Collection), which scholars observe is unique in the seventeenth century for portraying a harbor scene in an urban setting. The effect in many of Pynacker's pictures is restful and calm, reminiscent in some cases of Cuyp.* A number of peaceful portrayals of harbor scenes with cargo boats on rivers are grouped to the years before 1660. By 1659 dramatic changes emerge. In his Collapsing Bridge of that year (Schleissheim, Staatsgalerie) every form, as well as the action, takes on a turbulent feeling. Thereafter his calm landscapes become strangely animated, endowed with a restless energy by the movement of branches, trees, and foliage throughout the scene. A good example is Boats on a Lake (Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), in which the trees writhe and twist with a powerful internal energy. A dappled, shirting light and a palette dominated by blue-greens and grays are characteristic of this phase of Pynacker's career. The boat and harbor scenes from this period sometimes hark back to his earlier manner, but they tend to have more crisply and boldly defined shapes, with stronger contrasts of lights and darks as well as a more deliberate use of highlights and stylization of form. See, for example, his Barges and Ships on an Italian Coast (Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum). Called romantic, original, and daring by some critics, Pynacker has been criticized by others for being too hard, artificial, and contrived to rank him with the greatest landscape painters, such as Jacob van Ruisdael and Philips Koninck. Pynacker's treatment of individual trees, which endows them with animate energy as well as a sense of decay, does, however, rank him among the most gifted seventeenth-century interpreters of nature. |
Samples of Work
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