Mountainous Landscape with Bridge

Verboeckhoven was a leading nineteenth-century animalier painter who specialized in livestock. In this view, which includes a diminutive pair of deer at bottom center, he reversed the scale of figure to ground typical of his compositions, resulting in one of his rare pure landscapes. It was perhaps inspired by the scenery of the Ardennes forest, which he visited in the 1820s. A characteristic feature of Verboeckhoven’s mature work is its reliance on pedantic detail, which is absent here. This painting’s naturalist aesthetic reflects the enduring appeal of seventeenth-century Dutch landscapists, notably Adam Pynacker, and perhaps the young artist’s receptivity to current trends in landscape painting in evidence at the salons of Paris and northern France in the 20s. It also bears a vestigial affinity with picturesque views by Verboeckhoven’s teacher, Balthasar Paul Ommeganck (1755–1826), for example Landscape with a Wooden Bridge of 1791 (see Richard Kerremans in Denis Coekelberghs and Pierre Loze, eds., 1770–1830: Autour du neo-classicisme en Belgique, exh. cat., Musée communal des Beaux-Arts d’Ixelles, Brussels, 1985, pp. 302–3, no. 263, colorpl. 30, as collection Galerie d’Arenberg, Brussels).

Asher Ethan Miller 2013

Inscription: Signed (lower right): Eugene Verboeckhoven

sale, Christie's, New York, March 1, 1984, no. 230, as "Mountain Goats in a Rocky Gorge at Sunset," to Whitney; Wheelock Whitney III, New York (from 1984)

New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. "The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785–1850," January 22–April 21, 2013, unnumbered cat. (fig. 68).

McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. "Nature's Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape," September 10–December 10, 2017, no. 36.

Asher Ethan Miller. "The Path of Nature: French Paintings from the Wheelock Whitney Collection, 1785–1850." Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 70 (Winter 2013), p. 47, fig. 68 (color).

Jeffery Howe in Nature's Mirror: Reality and Symbol in Belgian Landscape. Ed. Jeffery Howe. Exh. cat., McMullen Museum of Art, Boston College. Boston, 2017, p. 14, colorpl. 36, calls the image a forerunner to that of bridges in adventure films.