Estuary Landscape & Fishermen At Sunset. Aert Van Der Neer (1603-1677) Att-

Oil on canvas presented in a powerful frame with an inverted profile in molded and blackened wood interspersed with gilded guilloche baguettes.
Dimensions with the frame: 65.5 x 81 cm. The canvas alone: ​​42.5 x 57 cm

This estuary landscape with a church and mills is animated by both fishermen and walkers.
Powerfully lit by a setting sun that sets the entire sky and its clouds ablaze with an orange light, while disappearing behind the roof of a house, perhaps attributed to:
Aert van der Neer, Dutch painter of the "golden age" (Amsterdam 1603/1604 – id. 1677).

This landscape painter has a little-known career despite a certain prolificacy. He is one of the first painters in the Netherlands to have applied an original chiaroscuro to the landscape, both contrasting and very colorful, where the slate blue of the nocturnes contrasts with a yellow light ranging from clear to red. He remained famous for his seascapes and moonlit landscapes executed with sensitivity and poetry.
His oldest painting, a genre scene, is dated 1632, the time when he settled in Amsterdam. He would thus have devoted himself to painting only late in life, unless he had already been a student of Camphuysen c. 1626. If his first winter views are inspired by this master and especially by Avercamp, the chronology of his other landscapes is poorly known and very few of them are dated. The Dutch biographer, Arnold Houbraken tells us that he was a butler in a family from Gorinchem before opening an inn in Amsterdam in 1659 which he had to close in 1662; misunderstood by his contemporaries (like many other painters), his works were not very popular because they were off the beaten track;
Posterity did him justice, because his works are now exhibited in the greatest museums:

(Rijksmuseum; Avignon Museum; Copenhagen, S. M. f. K.; Hamburg, Kunsthalle; London, N. G.; Montpellier Museum; Louvre; Rotterdam, B. V. B.), his Sunsets (Kassel Museum; Mauritshuis; Hermitage; London, N. G.; Louvre; Paris, Petit Palais) and his Sunrises (Mauritshuis). Aert also left Winter Landscapes reminiscent of Avercamp and G. Van de Velde (Amiens Museum; Rijksmuseum; Brunswick, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum; Brussels, M. R. B. A.; Mauritshuis; Hermitage; London, N. G.; Munich, Alte Pin.; Vienna, K. M.) and Night Fires (Brussels, M. R. B. A.; Copenhagen, S. M. f. K.; Moscow, Pushkin Museum).

In addition to the painting sold in London at Bonhams on December 6, 2017. Lot: 48
W. Schulz, in his catalogue raisonné of the painter (2002), lists several versions of this painting. One example sold in Amsterdam, 12 October 1774, lot 352
Another version sold in Cologne, 3 June 1959, lot 111
Other examples are known: at the town hall of Bruges (B 138869); and at the sale, Amsterdam (Brandt), 28 June 1973, lot 33.

Provenance: Swiss Collection
Good original condition.
Sold with certificate