Dutch landscape painter, active mainly in Delft and in Amsterdam. He was in Italy for three years (before 1649) and he was one of the outstanding Dutch exponents of Italianate landscapes. His style resembles that of Jan Both and Jan Asselyn, but his mature work often has a distinctive and attractive silvery tonality.
Southern river landscapes with barges became, like Mediterranean harbour views, a popular genre for the Dutch Italianate painters during the 1640s. About 1650 Pynacker began painting such river scenes with barges, often with rock formations as a backdrop. The present painting is an example of this group.
Adam Pynacker probably never visited Italy, his treatment of light is the result of contact with the work of Jan Both and Jan Asselyn.
It is likely that the format of this painting was modified early on in the painting’s history.
Adam Pynacker is said to have spent three years in Italy. Although no documentary evidence support the statement, the subtly observed reflections of the light clouds in the luminous morning sky upon the mirror-smooth water of his outstanding Barges on a River suggest that he had firsthand contact with the landscape in Italy.
The picture is unusual in his oeuvre. More characteristic are paintings of prominent white birches and beeches, elegant reeds, and clumps of thistles streaked with silvery light, seen against distant views of blue mountains. After working in Schiedam, a port near Rotterdam that was probably his birthplace, and possibly in nearby Delft, he settled in 1661 in Amsterdam where he began to produce large-scale landscapes for patrician homes. Toward the end of the decade the demand for his landscapes of this type apparently dwindled. The works of his last years, often variations on earlier compositions, are cabinet-size with colours that are rather harsh and metallic.
Boats are moored on the shore of a lake surrounded by high mountains. The countryside is set aglow by golden light which picks out features lsuch as the white bark of the birch-tree, the woman and child, and the ox and the ass. The presence of these animals may indicate that the painting is meant to represent Mary’s flight to Egypt with the infant Jesus, but this is uncertain. Pynacker was one of the Italianates.
This well-preserved painting is a good example of Pynacker’s early landscapes in which the artist structures the composition with the help of geometric architecture, the broad planes and sharp edges of which are emphasized by strong contrasts of light and shadow.
This painting represents a typical image of the South seen by a Dutch painter. Under the pretext of showing barges landing ashore in the evening, the painter bathes the entire landscape in golden light.
Onlookers laugh as a ferryboat worker splashes into the water after a donkey. This commotion is set against a serene landscape, punctuated by the stern gentleman on the shore and the placid cow beside him. Before becoming a painter, Pynacker was a merchant, and it was on a trip to Italy that he first encountered the golden sunlight that would later infuse his paintings. Here, it bathes the landscape and adds dramatic highlights.
In this serene view of a Dutch harbour, evidently the artist’s hometown of Schiedam, Pynacker brings the light of a late afternoon on the Mediterranean to the north. The coppery illumination of the setting sun recalls landscapes by Jan Both and Italianate scenes by Pynacker himself.
