Cornelis Lelienbergh (c.1620 – c.1680 The Hague)

Still Life of Game, Hunting Implements and Quinces

Oil on canvas, 73 x 62 cm (28.4 x 24.4 inch); presented in an ebonised frame with gilt inner slip

Signed ‘C. Lelienbergh’ (lower right)

Provenance
~ With Otto Naumann, New York
~ Sotheby’s, New York, 29 January 2009, lot 109
~ Private collection, Connecticut, USA

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Cornelis Lelienbergh was born around 1620; when he joined the Guild of St Luke in The Hague in 1646 he had to pay an admission fee of 18 guilders, which indicates he was not born in that city.¹ He married Agnieta Abrahams van der Hennein in 1649 and several of his children were baptised from 1650 to 1657 in the Roman Catholic church in the Oude Molstraat, and in 1662 in the Dutch Reformed Nieuwe Kerk. In 1656 Lelienbergh was among the founders of the painters’ society Pictura. He was also a member of the city ‘schutterij’ civic militia. Lelienbergh moved to Zeeland in 1666, where he is recorded as a clerk at the fortress Moerspuy in Zeeland Flanders.

Lelienbergh was mainly active as a painter of still-lifes, influenced by Willem van Aelst (1627–1683), whose pupil he may have been. Around the middle of the seventeenth century, Lelienbergh was the leading artist for game still-lifes in The Hague, with meticulous attention to the depiction of feathers, furs and other materials.² He was of influence to Melchior d’Hondecoeter (1636–1695), who stepped in his footsteps when he settled in The Hague in 1659.

Lelienbergh’s still-lifes are mostly of dead birds and hunting equipment, which were highly fashionable during the Golden Age, especially with aristocratic collectors, who enjoyed hunting and shooting privileges on their country estates. Some works by Lelienbergh show dead birds hanging from white-plastered walls in illusionistic trompe l’oeil manner, but the current work has a stone ledge and niche as a background, painted in shades of grey, brown and ochre. His works remained popular with the most notable collectors during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but his polished technique and chosen subject matter fell out of favour during the twentieth century, only to be re-established in recent decades.

Paintings by Lelienbergh are preserved in the National Gallery of Denmark, Copenhagen, the Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam, the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm and the Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. The present work in excellent condition can for instance be compared to Lelienbergh’s Still-Life with Hare and Black Rooster in the collection of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (fig.).³

1. For the artist, see Edwin Buijsen and Charles Dumas, Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw: het Hoogsteder lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag 1600-1700, The Hague 1998, pp. 37, 185-189, 324.
2. Edwin Buijsen, ‘Tussen ‘Konsthemel’ en Aarde. Panorama van de schilderkunst in Den Haag tussen 1600 en 1700’, in: Buijsen and Dumas, op. cit., p. 37.
3. Oil on canvas, 101 x 85 cm, signed and dated ‘C: Lelienbergh f. Ao 1659’, inv. no. SK-A-1741; P.J.J. van Thiel, All the paintings in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam 1976, p. 344, repr.