Cornelis van Dalem

Landscape with Shepherds

Cornelis van Dalem (* around 1530/35 in Antwerp , † 1573 in Breda ) was a Dutch painter of noble origin. According to archival documents, however, he was also, or primarily, a businessman . Despite his small oeuvre known so far, Cornelis van Dalem occupies an important position among the Dutch landscape painters of the 16th century.

Life

The beginnings of human civilization

The archives of Antwerp and Breda give some information about the life of Cornelis van Dalem . The van Dalem family comes from Tholen in the Dutch province of Zeeland and moved into a fiefdom , which confirms the statement made by the Dutch artist biographer Karel van Mander regarding van Dalem's aristocratic origin. The family moved to Antwerp at an unspecified point in time, where van Dalem's father Peter Corneliszoon was a trader. The two sons Cornelis and Lodewijk were apprenticed to the painter Jan Adriaensens in Antwerp. After the leagues of the Antwerp Guild of Luke , Cornelis van Dalem began his apprenticeship in 1545. In 1556 he was appointed master . In the same year he married Beatrijs van Liedekercke. In other documents, Cornelis van Dalem is mentioned above all as a merchant and trader . Although van Dalem had bought a second house in Antwerp in 1565, he left the city that same year. Perhaps this had religious reasons, as he was accused of a connection to the Anabaptist sect , whose connection was forbidden by law in 1566. Van Dalem moved to an estate near Breda, where he died in 1573.

Van Dalem was Bartholomäus Spranger's last teacher from 1560 to 1564 . Spranger's early work still shows great parallels to that of his teacher. Spranger served Karel van Mander in the early 1560s as an informant about Cornelis van Dalem, so that his information can be considered reliable. In his “Schilderboek”, first published in 1604, van Mander describes Cornelis van Dalem as an outstanding painter of rocks. This is confirmed by the surviving work, in which often bizarre rock walls block the viewer's view of the background - except for a few natural rock arches. According to van Mander, van Dalem did not paint the figures in his pictures himself, but had them executed by Gillis Mostaert or Joachim Bueckelaer . To this rule is probably van Dalems drawing with the temptation of St. Anthony in Frankfurt's Städel an exception. While Mostaert and Bueckelaer as an employee in the resulting work van Dalems stylistically can not be detected, is van Dalems collaboration with Jan van Wechlen a signature in the jointly created painting "Landscape with a nomadic family", two fragments of which have been preserved in the Karlsruhe State Art Gallery .

Artistic creation

Ludwig Burchard was the first to put together a group of landscape paintings under van Dalem's name in 1924. In the following years, this group was expanded to include a few works. Two paintings with van Dalem's monogram helped with the attribution , the “Landscape with the Flight to Egypt” from 1565, a loss in the war in Berlin, and the “Landscape with Homestead” from 1564 in the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The small oeuvre supports van Mander's statement that van Dalem, as a wealthy merchant, did not paint for the sake of money, but only for pleasure. Since Cornelis van Dalem did not make a living from painting and therefore did not have to comply with the wishes of clients, he was free to choose his subjects. It should be emphasized that it is not only the rock representations praised by Karel van Mander that give Cornelis van Dalem an important role in art history . The painter was well-read and had a humanistic education. His works show that he must have known, among other things, Lucretius ' didactic poem “De rerum natura” and the “Ten Books on Architecture” by Vitruvius . He was particularly interested in topics relating to the origin of human civilization and its development. Thus, in individual paintings and in the Frankfurt drawing, ancient and primitive dwellings are depicted, in which rock grottos interact with elements assembled by human hands. On the other hand, van Dalem's simultaneous interest in the decay and the transience of man-made things is striking. B. reflected in the Munich painting with the crumbling farmhouses and the palace ruins in the background. Three of his well-known pictures depict " gypsies ", which were more common in the Netherlands at the time. Presumably he associated these nomads with ideas of primitive life. This becomes particularly clear in the painting “Landscape with a nomadic family”, which was created around 1570 in collaboration with Jan van Wechlen . Willem van Haecht's depiction of the picture gallery by Cornelis van der Geest proves that van Dalem's works were coveted by collectors . There the painting with the "nomad family", of which two fragments have been preserved in the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe , is shown in a prominent place below the chandelier.

Works

• The Origin of Humanity, Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, 1560–1570, figures by Jan van Wechlen
• Landscape with nomad family (two fragments), Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, around 1570, figures by Jan van Wechlen
• Farm with beggars, Musée du Louvre, Paris
• Landscape with homestead, Alte Pinakothek, Munich, dated 1564
• Landscape with Adam and Eve, Iris & B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts, Stanford University
• Rock landscape with shepherds, Museo del Prado, Madrid
• The temptation of St. Antonius (pen drawing), Städelsches Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt
• Landscape with the Flight into Egypt, State Museums, Berlin (lost in war 1945), dated 1565, figures by Jan van Wechlen
• Adam and Eve mourn Abel, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (probably copy after a lost painting by Cornelis van Dalem)

literature

• Dominique Allart: Un paysagiste à redécouvrir: Cornelis van Dalem. In: Revue belge d'archéologie et d'histoire de l'art. Vol. 62, 1992, pp. 95-128.
• Ludwig Burchard : The landscape painter Cornelis van Dalem. In: Yearbook of the Prussian Art Collections. Volume 45, 1924, pp. 66-71.
• Heinrich Gerhard Franz : Dutch landscape painting in the age of mannerism. Graz 1969, pp. 222-227.
• Fritz Grossmann : Cornelis van Dalem Re-examined. In: The Burlington Magazine. Volume 96, 1954, pp. 42-51.
• Jan Lauts : Cornelis van Dalem and Jan van Wechlen. Landscape with nomad family. Karlsruhe 1970.
• Karel van Mander (Hrsg. Hessel Miedema): The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandisch and German Painters, from the first edition of the Schilderboeck (1603-1604). Doornspijk 1994.
• Tanja Michalsky : projection and imagination. The Dutch Landscape of the Early Modern Age in the Discourse of Geography and Painting. Munich 2011, pp. 249-254.
• Carl van de Velde: Archivalia over Cornelis van Dalem. In: Miscellanea Jozef Duverger: Bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden. Gent 1968, pp. 237-346.
• Friedrich Winkler : Addendum to Cornelis van Dalem. In: Yearbook of the Prussian Art Collections. Volume 46, 1925, pp. 255-258.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Velde 1968.
2. ↑ Velde 1968, p. 237; Mander / Wall 1936, p. 310.
3. ↑ Allart 1992, p. 96.
4. ↑ Velde 1968, p. 238; Allart 1992, p. 97.
5. ↑ Velde 1968, p. 238; Allart 1992, p. 96.
6. ↑ Allart 1992, p. 97.
7. ↑ Allart 1992, p. 97.
8. ↑ Grossmann 1954, p. 42; Franz 1969, p. 222.
9. ↑ Mander / Wall 1936, pp. 310-311.
10. ↑ Michalsky 2011, p. 249.
11. ↑ Grossmann 1954, p. 43.
12. ↑ Michalsky 2011, p. 250.
13. ↑ Michalsky 2011, p. 249; Mander / Wall 1936, p. 310.
14. ↑ Grossmann 1954, p. 43; See Lauts 1970.
15. ↑ See Willem van Haecht's painting, which he made in Cornelis van der Geest's collection in 1628 in honor of the visit of the Antwerp governor couple.

See also

Cornelis van Dalen

Web links

Commons : Cornelis van Dalem  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Pictures by Cornelis van Dalem on explore.rkd.nl