(Workshop of) Panoramic View of a Hunting Lodge at the edge of the Sonian Forest/ (atelier de) Vue panoramique d'un château en bordure de la Forêt de Soignes, ca. 1650
This museum-sized painting depicts a hunting lodge on the outskirts of the Sonian Forest, which we have tentatively identified as the Château de la Vénerie in Boitsfort (which has now been entirely demolished).
This gigantic bird's-eye view is certainly a workshop production, executed around 1650 by several artists under the supervision of Lucas van Uden, whose composition incorporates several characteristic elements of his style. It shows a landscape with vast horizons, stretching from the edge of the Sonian forest to the gates of Brussels, and illuminated by the setting sun breaking through the clouds.
- Lucas van Uden, a Flemish landscape master of the 17th century
Lucas van Uden was a Flemish painter, draughtsman and engraver. He was the son of Artus van Uden (b. 1544), painter to the city of Antwerp, and the grandson of Pieter van Uden, founder of the city's famous tapestry and silk manufactory. Lucas was probably trained by his father. Around 1626 (age 32), he joined the Antwerp Guild of Saint Luke as a "master's son".
For most of his life, he lived in Antwerp, except for a short period around 1650, when he probably came to Brussels, and during which our picture would have been painted. He enjoyed great success during his lifetime, living in the center of Antwerp in a comfortable house with his eight children. Although he never frequented Rubens' studio, the influence of the latter's work was decisive for Lucas van Uden, who made numerous copies after the great Antwerp master, such as this Landscape with a Rainbow, painted around 1635-1640 and kept in Vienna, and enlivened many of his compositions with a rainbow.
Van Uden's pupils included Philips Augustin Immenraet (1627-79) and Jan Baptist Bonnecroy (1618-76). His brother Jacob van Uden (1627-1629) was also a landscape painter, and Jacob's son Adriaen van Uden (1655-1696) and grandson Pieter van Uden (1673-1644), a miniature painter, were also active in Antwerp
2. The influence of Lucas van Uden
Our painting is a workshop production in which several hands are recognizable, particularly in the figures in the foreground. The strong influence of Lucas van Uden is perceptible, particularly in the overall composition and atmospheric elements.
Most of van Uden's paintings are constructed according to the same blueprint. The foreground usually consists of an embankment topped by a few tall trees with transparent foliage. These trees are illuminated from behind, with yellow-orange highlights on the tips of their branches. Arranged in small groups, they are all very straight, except for one, which is leaning sideways, generally towards the center of the panel. We find this characteristic in the embankment to the left of our composition (detail 1).
In terms of size and composition, our painting is also quite similar to Lucas van Uden's Landscape with a Rainbow in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp, in which a rainbow can be seen in the background on the right (as in our painting).
3. Landscape description
Beyond a mound rising to the right of the composition and occupied by a group of hunters with their dogs (detail 1), the composition can be summed up as the alternation of two large pictorial spaces: a mosaic of woods and fields, in the middle of which the hunting lodge stands out, and the great mass of a cloud-laden sky, which occupies the upper third of the composition and creates a kind of mirror play between the clouds and the darker areas of the landscape.
While the sky to the left of the composition is ablaze with the setting sun, the last rays of sunlight illuminate the surroundings of the hunting lodge (detail 6) and the hunters gathered with their dogs on the front right mound (detail 1), while the right-hand side of the landscape is already sinking into the night. This sweep of the landscape by the sun's last rays, as daylight inexorably fades, introduces a subtle dynamic into the composition and suggests an elegiac atmosphere, making the fleetingness of the present moment palpable.
Several details enliven the landscape. In the foreground on the left, we discover a bucolic environment in which a cowherd plays his pipe on the edge of a pond, surrounded by his herds, with his dog as his only audience (detail 2).
Further to the right, a man is busy shelling the first walnuts, suggesting that we are in the early stages of autumn (detail 3); a cart (another motif perhaps inspired by Rubens, who used it in many landscapes) emerges at the end of a sunken lane (detail 4).
The skyline shows the city of Brussels on the far left, dominated by the slender silhouette of the Town Hall tower (detail 5). This authentication of Brussels with the city in the background is comforted by the comparison with the View of Brussels painted by Jean-Baptiste Bonnecroy (a pupil of Lucas van Uden) in 1665.
4. Proposed identification of the hunting lodge
Strategically positioned above a pond (detail 6), the hunting lodge depicted in our painting is undeniably a pleasure residence. It is situated at the heart of a quadrilateral surrounded by a moat, accessed by a drawbridge leading to a crenellated gatehouse. The garden surrounding the château, built in the heart of this quadrilateral, is structured into four large squares, three of which are subdivided into four parterres de broderies. Three of the corners are occupied by small pleasure pavilions built over the moat. The well in front of the château, the wall extending the gatehouse to the right and the gabled building built along the moat could be the remains of a former fortified feudal residence.
Successive wars and the major urban upheavals in the Brussels area have made the identification of this hunting lodge a difficult task. However, the map reproduced below, taken from the program "La Place Communale, berceau de la Vénerie ducale"[1] , leads us to propose an identification with the Château de la Vénerie in Boitsfort.
Jean I, Duke of Brabant, founded the Boitsfort Vénerie. When he married Marguerite de France in 1270, she received a dower that included the Boitsfort mill and the Huntsmen House Pond. In 1282, he had a chapel built in honor of Saint-Hubert, patron saint of hunters. In 1414, the feudal manor was enlarged and reinforced. It was flanked by towers and surrounded by water, where packs and hunting gear were kept.
The twelve tapestries (corresponding to the 12 months of the year), known as the Maximilian Hunts[2] faithfully depict hunting episodes in well-known locations in the Sonian Forest. The April tapestry features the oldest representation of the feudal castle of Boitsfort and its outbuildings. It is interesting to note the presence of a well in the courtyard[3] and that of the gatehouse, which probably gave access to a drawbridge (on the right of the composition).
After the Emperor's death, the site fell into disrepair due to a lack of visitors. The castle, rebuilt in 1570-1572 under the Duke of Alba, was plundered and burnt down in 1587. It was rebuilt and refurbished under Albert and Isabelle in 1600-1601. Unfortunately, the exterior of this building is not well documented, since the only other representation of it that we have found is a view published in Sanderus’ Domus Regiae Belgicae in 1659: we see (on the right of the engraving) a rather modest, stepped-gabled building adjoining a chapel.
The presence of a tower to the left of the building depicted in our painting is puzzling, as it does not appear in the print published in 1659. Infrared reflectography of our painting indicates, however, that the painter had begun by drawing a building offset to the left, whose entrance porch did not include a tower. The tower may have been added to lend picturesqueness to an otherwise sober building, or to illustrate a construction project about which we do not have any further knowledge.
It is worth mentioning that there is a chapel (indicated by the cross on top of its roof) behind the main building in our painting, which could be the Saint-Hubert chapel (shown here parallel rather than perpendicular to the house).
Louis XIV's wars were disastrous for both the château and the hunting activities. The dogs were sold and the chapel looted in 1684. From 1698 to 1700, Governor Maximilien-Emmanuel of Bavaria ordered major reconstruction work that completely altered the appearance of the building [4] and laid out the driveway leading to the château, the Drève du Duc. Ferraris's map, drawn up between 1770 and 1778, shows the rebuilt hunting lodge in the middle of the pond, below the sloping hill we see in our painting.
In 1750, major damage was reported to the château due to lack of maintenance. Finally, in 1776, the decision was taken to demolish it. The surrounding pond was filled in at the end of the 19th century. Avenue Delleur now occupies part of the site.
5. Historical background to panoramic views
Our painting is part of a long tradition of depictions of pleasure estates, the earliest examples of which date back to the Italian Renaissance. In 1565, Hippolyte d'Este commissioned Gerolamo Muziona to paint frescoes at the Este Villa in Tivoli, depicting the villa and its famous gardens. A few years later, in 1578, Cardinal Gambara commissioned frescoes at the Lante Villa depicting not only his villa, but also that of Alessandro Farnese in Caprarola. The best-known example of these representations is the series of lunettes depicting Medici properties commissioned around 1599-1602 by Grand Duke Ferdinand I de' Medici to the painter Giusto (Justus van) Utens to decorate a salon in his villa at Artimino.[5]
This taste for aerial representations then spread to France, where Henri IV commissioned the painter Louis Oisson to paint representations of his hunting grounds in the Galerie des Cerfs at the Château de Fontainebleau, an example later imitated by his minister the Duc de Sully at the Château de Villebon and then by Cardinal de Richelieu for his Parisian residence, which later became the Palais Royal.
Later, the production of bird-eye view flourished in Flanders, forming a very specific sub-category within landscape painting. Jan Brueghel the Elder's View of Mariemont Castle (now in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dijon) is one of the earliest examples. Representations of battles supplemented those of large estates, under the impetus of painter Sébastien Vrancx (1573 - 1647) and his pupil Pieter Snayers (1592 -1666).
6. Framing
Our painting is presented in an early 20th century blackened wooden frame, simply adorned with a gold band around the view.
Main bibliographical references :
Sander Pierron - Histoire de la forêt de Soigne [sic], Brussels, Imp. scientifique Charles Bulens, 1905
Le paysage Brabançon au XVIIème siècle - catalog of the exhibition held at the Musée d'art ancien de Bruxelles from October 13 to December 5, 1976.
La Forêt de Soignes - art et histoire - des origines au XVIIIème siècle - catalog of the exhibition held at the Château de Trois-Fontaines in 1987
Die Flämische Landschaft 1520-1700 - catalog of the exhibition held at Villa Hügel in Essen from August 23 to November 30, 2003 and at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna from December 23, 2003 to April 12, 2004
Alan Rubin & Denis Harrington In Search of a Lost Landscape Louis XIV's Visit to the Château de Juvisy Pelham Galleries Ltd 2010
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ie74fhN8zPY
[2] These tapestries are housed in the Musée du Louvre. They were woven, probably by order of Charles V, from cartoons drawn by Bernard Van Orley in the early 1530s.
[3] If the well is indeed in the castle courtyard, which would seem logical, then it would be more appropriate to call it "Leaving for the Hunt" than "the Return from the Hunt". This idea would be consistent with the impetuosity of the dogs depicted in the background.
[4] The château was completely destroyed and rebuilt on the edge of the pond, at a distance from the chapel. Rebuilt in 1723, the chapel stood until 1840, when the present-day Watermael-Boitsfort town hall was built in its place.
[5] Fourteen of them have survived and are now on display at the Medicean Villa in La Petraia, near Florence.