PROVENANCE -

Alexander Sander, London; sale, Christie’s, London, 15 February 1952, lot 163.

Born into a Catholic family of painters and draughtsmen in Antwerp, Jan Frans van Bloemen was trained in his native city, initially by his brother Pieter van Bloemen, who left for Rome in 1674, and subsequently between 1681 and 1684 by Anton Goubau, who had himself worked in Rome in the 1640s. Van Bloemen traveled to Paris in 1684-5, and thence to Lyon, where he rejoined his brother, and the two visited Turin before arriving in Rome in 1686-7. There they were both members of the Schildersbent, the Confraternity of Dutch and Flemish artists resident in Rome, in which Jan Frans was nicknamed Orizzonte (“Horizon”) on account of his facility for producing panoramic landscapes. The brothers occupied the studio that had previously belonged to Claude Lorraine. Orizzonte married an Italian girl in 1693, and he never left Rome except for an eight month tour of Naples, Sicily, and Malta. Vanvitelli stood as godfather to his first child, born in 1694. Inspired by the Roman countryside and by the classicizing landscapes of Gaspard Dughet, Orizzonte developed a highly distinctive personal style which enjoyed considerable popularity with Italian collectors and English Grand Tourists alike. By the second decade of the eighteenth century he was regarded as the foremost landscape painter in Italy. From the 1730s the influence of Poussin is apparent in his work, Orizzonte even directly borrowing motifs on occasion. Carlo Maratti, Pompeo Batoni and above all Placido Costanzi, were among the artists who contributed figures to his landscapes.