View on the Tiber, near the Ripa Grande, Rome

Description:

Jan Both (after)

View on the Tiber, Near the Ripa Grande, Rome

Oil on panel

454mm x 555mm

This painting is an exact copy of the painting View on the Tiber by Jan Both in the National Gallery, No 958. Jan Both was born in Utrecht around 1615-16 to Dirck Both, himself a glass-painter or engraver and perhaps Jan's first teacher. Subsequently, Jan and his brother Andries (1611/12-1641) probably both trained as painters in the studio of Abraham Bloemaert. Andries was the first to visit Italy around 1632, where Jan followed him around 1637/38; both lived in Rome until Andries' death by drowning in Venice in 1641, possibly on their way home to Utrecht. Jan Both remained at Utrecht for the rest of his life. Like his brother, who specialized in bambocciate or peasant scenes, Jan had also at first painted genre scenes until he discovered the work of Claude Lorraine and became a landscape painter in the Italianate style. Although he occasionally painted biblical and mythological scenes, his main works are realistic Italianate landscapes bathed in the warm glow of a Mediterranean evening, which were to become highly popular amongst northern European collectors and would influence the work of other Dutch landscape painters such as Aelbert Cuyp (who never visited Italy himself). In his later career Jan Both sometimes collaborated with other painters, especially with animal and figure painters, just as he may earlier have collaborated with his brother Andries, and with Claude, Poussin, Dughet and others during his stay in Rome. He also executed a number of landscape etchings. Jan Both died in Utrecht in 1652. During his lifetime, his paintings had been greatly sought after and served as an inspiration for other landscape artists. His work continued to be admired in the eighteenth century, but then became neglected from the second half of the nineteenth until the mid twentieth century. Critical reassessment of Jan Both's work only began in the 1960s.