Adriaen van de Velde

The landscapes of adriaen van de velde are among the very best that the Dutch Golden Age produced, showing great variety and superb draughtsmanship, depicting meadows, Italianate views, beaches, dunes, forests, winter scenes, and portraits in landscape settings. The short-lived artist's work was greatly appreciated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, highly sought after by collectors in Germany, France and England. Despite that fame and the exquisite quality of Adriaen van de Velde's output, this exhibition marks the first time that a substantial body of his work has been assembled.

The artist made figure and animal studies in seductive red chalk and compositional studies in pen and ink in preparation for his paintings, making it possible to follow very precisely the various phases in his creative process - perhaps more so than is possible for any other Dutch artist of the period. For this reason, and because of their exceptional quality, drawings form a major part of the exhibition that this catalogue accompanies, with some of them reunited for the first time with the paintings for which they were studies.