A Fortress, Mathieu Dubus, in or after 1639 – (Mathieu Dubus) ◄ ก่อน ต่อไป ►

ศิลปิน: Mathieu Dubus

วันที่: 1639

ขนาด: 47 x 63 cm

เทคนิค: Oil On Panel

The handful of landscape paintings by Dubus that are recognized today all have a fantastical air. In the present one, the bizarre rock formations of the cliffs encircling the fortress recall Hercules Segers’s ‘lunar’ landscapes.1 Dubus’s technique of scratching into and pushing the brown glaze around to expose the grey underpaint in the landscape also suggests the influence of Segers’s painterly experiments. None of Dubus’s paintings are dated. The results of the dendrochronological examination of the Rijksmuseum panel, which indicate a date of execution in or after 1639, have thus far provided the only foothold for establishing a timeframe for the few known landscapes by the artist. The date in or after 1639 is also consistent with the observation that Segers, who moved to The Hague in 1633, was Dubus’s principal influence. Dubus painted at least three panoramic views of fortifications surrounded by water. A picture in The Hague shows fortifications similar to those in the Rijksmuseum painting, but they are more extensive and are situated in the far distance.2 Another painting by Dubus, the present whereabouts of which are unknown, is closer to the present work as far as the size and foreground placement of the fort are concerned.3 In some earlier catalogues of the Rijksmuseum’s collection, the location was tentatively identified as the island of Ischia in the Gulf of Naples.4 However, that island’s Castello Aragonese, although surrounded by water, does not resemble the fortifications in the present painting, which are probably imaginary. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 60.