Exhibition: Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape

The first ever exhibition devoted to the Dutch painter and draughtsman Adriaen van de Velde (1636 - 1672), one of the finest landscape artists of the Dutch Golden Age. Through collaboration with the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, over 60 paintings and exquisite preparatory drawings by this prolific, but tragically short-lived artist will be brought to London.

A Dutch Italianate, Van de Velde represents a point of artistic cross-communication across borders, fusing agricultural landscapes in Holland with mythological Arcadian scenes in Italian settings. Compared by the renowned art historian Wolfgang Stechow (1896-1974) to Mozart's chamber music, Van de Velde's paintings are delicate, carefully composed and demonstrate his mastery of lighting effects as well as the human figure.

Van de Velde died at the early age of 35, and yet he produced a great number of masterpieces that earned him posthumous fame. As well as bringing together 60 works, the exhibition will reunite these paintings with their preparatory studies in red chalk or pen and ink for the first time. The exhibition will offer not only a survey of the artist’s oeuvre but also a rare glimpse of a seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painter at work, from conception to completion.