Willem Schellinks

Willem Schellinks
Raid on the Medway by Schellinks in 1667-1668.
Born	Willem Schellinks 1627 Amsterdam
Died	1678 (aged 50–51) Amsterdam
Nationality	Netherlands
Known for	Painting
Movement	Baroque

Willem Schellinks (1627–1678), was a Dutch Golden Age landscape painter.

Biography

He traveled to France with Lambert Doomer in 1646. After that he undertook another journey in 1661–1665 as the guide of Heere Jakob Thierry de Jong, a young gentleman on his Grand Tour. According to Houbraken, Schellinks compiled his drawings and notes about this last journey in three volumes, that weren't published, but which he kept for friends to read. The painter-engraver Arnoud van Halen acquired these volumes and Houbraken was granted permission to read through them himself. This trip, which he began on 14 July 1661, included visits to England, France, Italy, Sicily, Malta, Germany, and Switzerland. He describes the main sights of the cities he visits, and the most notable artworks of which Houbraken included. His route home from Italy was "from Venice to Padua, over Verona, Mantua, Trento, and Munich, where he went to see all of the rooms of the newly built Palace of the Bavarian Counts, and described all of the paintings and statues. He then continued to Augsburg, Regensburg, Nuremberg, Hanau, Frankfurt, Worms, Frankenthal, Heidelberg, Speyer, Strasbourg, Breisach, Basel, Zurich, Baden, Bern, Mainz, Cologne, Mulheim, Dusseldorf, Cleves, Nijmegen and Utrecht, where he arrived 23 August 1665."

Shah Jahan and his four sons, by Willem Schellinks, Holland school, end of the 17th century.

Schellinks' hand-written journal, written some years after his travels 1661–1665 and based on his now lost notes, is preserved in the Royal Library of Copenhagen; a transcription Schellinks had made is now owned by the Bodleian Library. The England part of the journal was published in English. The journal forms an important record of the conditions of travel in the 17th century, and while Schellinks does not offer many insights into his views on art or approach to landscape painting, his description of the art collections in the Roman palaces would have filled a gap in the Dutch travel literature of his time. Schellinks journals of his first trip with Doomer were not read or commented on by Houbraken, because he probably didn't know they existed.

External links

• Media related to Willem Schellinks at Wikimedia Commons
• Dutch Artists and Mughal Paintings - Notes by Kavita Singh of a lecture given by Professor Sanjay