ATTRIBUTED TO HENDRIK VOOGD (1766-1839)

FIGURES AMONGST RUINS ON THE PALATINE, ROME, ONE SKETCHING, WITH A DOMED CHURCH BEYOND
Bears collector's stamp l.r. [L.4407]
Pen & inks with washes & watercolour on laid paper
62.3 x 44.2 cm
 
PROVENANCE:
Unidentified Collector (Lugt 4407);
Franz Xaver Pieler (1876-1952), Klosterneuburg;
Thence by descent, Private collection, Austria;
 
 
 
 
An earlier, smaller version of this subject rendered in pen & ink and without wash, with a slightly different composition (wherein the church is missing and the view is somewhat less sophisticated overall), can be found in the Albertina, Vienna (acc. no. 14976). A drawing by Jean Grandjean, who (like Voogd) was a student of the same teacher as Voogd, Jurriaen Andriessen, and travelled to Rome shortly before Voogd, shows the same part of the the Palatine ruins (Rijksmuseum, acc. no. RP-T-2015-54-2, dated 1779). It has been suggested that the present work is so close to the version in the Albertina, and so confident and ambitious in scale, that it is most probably an earlier version by Voogd which he adapted for a more finished studio version to sell. 
 
 
 
By the late-19th and early 20th century, Hendrik Voogd's name had begun to fade into obscurity. It was G.J. Hoogewerff (1), followed by C.J. de Bruijn Kops (2), who brought him out of obscurity and began to reconstruct his oeuvre. Although Voogd left behind a rich body of graphic work, only twenty to thirty paintings are known to survive today, all dating from the period between 1795 and 1831. So far, only a small number of his paintings have been identified; with the majority as yet hidden in private collections throughout Europe waiting to be discovered.
 

Trained under Jurriaen Andriessen (1742-1819) in Amsterdam, Hendrik Voogd left for Rome in 1788 on a stipendium from his patron Dirk Versteegh, and was to remain there for the rest of his life. He was appointed a honorary member of the Academia di San Luca in 1816, and six years later he was invited to join the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Amsterdam.

In Rome, Voogd associated with the German and Austrian landscape painters, in particular the Nazarene painters Joseph Anton Koch and Johann Christian Reinhart. Together with his fellow artists, he went on numerous sketching journeys through the Roman Campagna, which he later utilised in his finished compositions. For these, Voogd followed the idiom established by Claude Lorrain and Nicolas Poussin, which had been revitalised by painters like Hackert. Thanks in part to this influence and to his masterful painting of atmospheric effects and light, his contemporaries called Voogd the 'Dutch Claude Lorrain'.