Pieter Boddingh Laer
(1599 - 1642) |
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Landscapes, Secular Narratives Art Work
| Name: |
Pieter Boddingh Laer |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Haarlem |
| Nationality: |
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| Birth: |
1599 |
| Death: |
1642 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Landscapes, Secular Narratives |
| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
bambocciata |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painting
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Biography
| Most famous for lending his nickname to a movement of genre painters that flourished in Rome during the first half of the seventeenth century, Pieter van Laer is also increasingly recognized as an innovator in the development of landscape painting. Now regarded as the first Dutch painter to increase the scale of hills, trees, and other elements of the landscape relative to the overall composition, van Laer thus made fundamental contributions to two types of paintings, genre and landscape, during his lifetime. Born Pieter Bodding van Laer in Haarlem, van Laer's birth date is now established as 1599, since his baptismal record has been published, correcting earlier sources that give his birth around 1595. We have no documents for his youth in Holland, but it is speculated that he studied first with Esaias van de Velde before traveling to Italy. Certainly van de Velde's approach to landscape influenced him. Around 1625 van Laer arrived in Rome, where he lived until 1639. There his rather misshapen body earned him the nickname II Bamboccio (the rag doll, or the fat crippled one). His friendships with Herman van Swanevelt, Sandrart, and Claude Lorrain were important, as was his leadership among the SchUdersbent (birds of a feather), a raucous organization of foreign (principally Netherlandish) painters established around 1620 by Cornelis van Poelenburgh and Bartholomeus Breenbergh. Upon joining the group, van Laer quickly became influential and the new subject he treated (the street life in Rome, featuring bandits, thieves, vagabonds, market vendors, beggars, craftsmen, travelers, and other vignettes such as flagellants in processions) soon found many imitators. Painted with a vibrant chiaroscuro, a technique no doubt influenced by Caravaggio, these pictures earned van Laer fame and sold well. They also (according to contemporary sources) earned him the derision of the local "professors" - the academicians such as Albani, Sacchi, and Reni, who painted more elevated subjects. Van Laer's slice-of-life scenes nonetheless inspired Italian imitators such as Salvator Rosa* and must have had an impact on later Italian painters such as Giacomo Ceruti and Giuseppe Crespi. Moreover, van Laer is generally regarded as an important influence on his fellow bambocciate painters, such as Jan Miel, Michelangelo Cerquozzi, Johannes Ungelbach, and the later members of the Schildersbent including Jan Both, Jan Asselijn, Philips Wouwerman, and Michiel Sweerts. Few signed and dated works, and even fewer documents, trace van Laer's development and later history. Adapting the landscape with narrative actions of Esaias van de Velde and responding to the genre themes of Willem Buytewech and Adriaen Brouwer, van Laer chose different themes and settings and took the development of genre painting in new directions. His earliest surviving pictures (which scholars date to the late 1620s) feature cavaliers and horsemen, waiting for a ferry in one instance (Edinburgh, Richard Ellis collection) or refreshing themselves outside a rustic inn (formerly Turin, Caretto collection). Many variants of such themes soon followed, sometimes incorporating architectural details and misty atmospheric effects learned from Breenbergh, as in Halt of the Hunters (St. Petersburg, Hermitage). That painting can be dated to around 1628 on the basis of a related drawing (Hamburg, Kunsthalle) bearing that date. Scholars place the remainder of van Laer's surviving oeuvre in the 1630s, although few examples are actually dated. His Blacksmith in a Cave (signed and dated 1635, Schwerin, Staatliches Museum) is a notable exception. Featuring a number of smaller (relative to the size of the picture) figures within a relatively larger overall space, the Schwerin Blacksmith is the basis for dating a number of similarly composed pictures by van Laer to the later 1630s. In these pictures the narrative element is strengthened, coming to a powerful climax in his scenes of violence, as in the Assault on Travelers (Naples, Banca Sannitica). More delightful and fascinating are van Laer's vignettes of street life in and around Rome, such as his scene of Beggars, Flagellants, and Street Vendors (Munich, Alte Pinakothek) and Interior of a Tavern (same location). Portrayed with a spontaneity and directness that belies the careful composition and arrangements of architecture and figures, these pictures are among the earliest portrayals of daily life in Rome - themes that would recur again and again in Italian painting through the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Van Laer's observations of the Roman cam pagn a that found their way into his pictures (notably in his Aqua Acetosa, Rome, Galleria Nazionalc d'Arte Antica), certainly must have had a profound influence on Both and Asselijn. From 162S documents record van Laer among the Roman inhabitants of the district around Santa Maria del Popolo, where he was recorded as Pietro Fiammingo (Flemish Pieter) and later as Pietro di Lara until 1637. Sandrart reports that van Laer returned to Amsterdam in 1639. Scholars speculate that van Laer's homeward journey may have taken two years, with stops in France along the way. He then divided his time between Amsterdam and Haarlem. Schrevelius, who published a history of Haarlem in 1647, states that van Laer was unable to put Italy out of his mind and so decided to return there. Hoogstraeten's account of 1678 notes that van Laer went to seek his fortune at the Austrian court of the Roman emperor Ferdinand III (a hypothesis supported by a number of van Laer's pictures noted in eighteenth-century accounts of the Liechtenstein collections). Where and when van Laer died remains a mystery. His sister stated in a testament of 1654 that she had not heard from him for twelve years and assumed that he had died, an assumption corroborated by Passeri's account that he died in the fall of 1642. |
Samples of Work
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