Jacob de Heush Utrecht 1657 Amsterdam 1701 Landscape

Jacob de Heush (Utrecht 1657 - Amsterdam 1701) - Landscape

Oil painting on canvas depicting Landscape with ruins and boats in a harbor

Canvas measures: width 102 cm, height 80 cm

The painting is accompanied by the expertise of Prof. Ferdinando Arisi.

The art of Jacob de Heusch springs from the comparison between the classical Roman landscape and the dramatic and passionate landscape of Salvatora Rosa. He began painting landscapes under the guidance of his uncle as a boy in Utrecht and in 1674 he moved to Rome. Even before arriving in Rome he had made paintings taken from engravings and paintings by Salvator Rosa. Arriving in Rome with the artistic baggage of the Dutch tradition, he meets the landscape painting and the Italian view and works his own personal assimilation. For a long time he works in the landscape, landscape and navy genre, where he expresses a high pictorial quality and the inventive ability to combine landscape and monuments with a loose and flexible brush stroke and a careful and punctual realism. His is a lively naturalism that is not an ocular description of reality but a reconciliation between poetic expression, fantastic nature and realistic feeling. He is attentive to the real datum, he draws by copying nature, his architectural interest in the buildings of Rome takes place directly on the spot. Heusch's views tend to reproduce not the static image but the atmosphere in which buildings and man are inserted. However, even the most closely observed landscape paintings always show a certain freedom from direct comparison with reality, leaving room for imagination. The articulation of the buildings, the animated scenes with its unmistakable figurines, are the result of the free play of superimposing the ideal one on the real datum. However the atmosphere of serenity and calm will always be an essential feature in its stylistic evolution. The use of ancient monuments is necessary not to faithfully portray Ancient Rome but to create an atmosphere. Jacob leaves Rome in the early nineties and returns to Holland where he dies at 45 in Amsterdam in 1701.