LEYTENS, GYSBRECHT
Antwerp 1586 - 1643/56


Title: Winter Landscape with a Lumberjack.
Technique: Oil on copper.
Measurement: 22 x 33cm.
Frame: Framed.
Certificate:
Walther Bernt, Munich, 23rd May 1972.

Provenance:
Private ownership, Germany.

Like the fine ramifications in a human vascular system, the snow-covered branches stretch out in all directions of a frosty winter's day that lies silent and icy over a Flemish landscape. Under the weight of the snow, the branches bend and twist, narrowing like a canyon into a surreal corridor that seems like the gateway to another world. The giant, overpowering trees lead a life of their own and seem, as it were, humanised, while the people underneath are more reminiscent of small, crawling insects struggling to survive under their protection. The otherwise fertile body of water is frozen over. So the dead branches remain the only raw material that nature instantly reveals. The crouched posture of the brushwood gatherers makes the enormous hardship and toil of their work clear, and even the bone-chilling cold almost tangible. The Flemish painter Gysbrecht Leytens devoted himself almost exclusively to snow-covered landscapes in his paintings and is therefore regarded as a "poet of frost". The artist, who trained in Antwerp in the workshop of Jacques Vrolyck and belonged to the Guild of St Luke, stages it in its two essences - the destructive and the protective forces of nature - between magical winter magic and the recurring scourge of man. A typical feature of his work is the innovation of a reduced colour palette of blue-grey and yellow-brown tones, with which he makes cold and warmth visible as if on a thermograph.