Allaert van EVERDINGEN
Alkmaar 1621 - Amsterdam 1675
Biography
Allaert van Everdingen was a pupil of Roelandt Savery in Utrecht and Pieter Molijn in Haarlem, where he entered the guild as an independent master in 1645. Very little is known of his life, apart from a trip to Norway and Sweden around 1643-1644 that was to be of considerable influence on his work. His itinerary on this trip, which can be vaguely reconstructed from inscriptions on the handful of actual topographical drawings that survive, seems to have taken him along the south coast of Norway, near the ports of Risör and Langeshund, and in the area of Gothenburg and the Bothusland province of western Sweden. Although it has occasionally been suggested that Everdingen made a second trip to Scandinavia in around 1660, there is in fact no evidence for this. Nevertheless, the artist continued to be inspired by the rugged, mountainous Nordic scenery long after his return to Haarlem. He produced a large number of landscape drawings of such scenes from memory, replete with pine forests, rustic wooden huts and waterfalls; these were to be a particular influence on the work of his younger contemporary, Jacob van Ruisdael. From 1652 Everdingen lived in Amsterdam, where he also worked as an art dealer.
Although his oil paintings are relatively rare, Everdingen was a prolific draughtsman. Some six hundred landscape drawings by the artist survive, including many of Scandinavian subjects. Many of Everdingen’s landscape drawings - for the most part executed in pen and brown wash and usually signed with the artist’s monogram - were in all likelihood intended for sale as works of art in their own right. Everdingen also produced a large number of landscape etchings, many of which were also inspired by his travels in Norway and Sweden. Only one extant drawing by Everdingen is dated, however, and a precise chronology of his draughtsmanship is difficult to establish. Significant groups of drawings by the artist are today in the collections of the British Museum, the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Albertina in Vienna, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, the Kunsthalle in Hamburg, the Teyler Museum in Haarlem, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, and elsewhere.
