An allegory of spring

JACOB GRIMMER

Antwerp 1525/26-before 1590

Oil on panel 27,3 x 37 cm.
Signed lower left ‘Grimmer fecit’

Provenance
René Gilbert, Geneva
By descent until anonymously sold
Sale Sotheby’s, London, 14 December 2000, lotno. 3
Private collection, UK
Sale Sotheby’s, London, 5 July 2017, lotno. 49
Private collection

Comparable literature
R. de Bertier de Sauvigny, Jacob et Abel Grimmer catalogue raisonné, Brussels 1991

This wonderfully atmospheric landscape would no doubt have originally formed part of a set of the Four Seasons. The motifs of figures planting out a kitchen garden enclosure and of families travelling along the roads moving their possessions were typically used by Grimmer to denote this time of the year and recur for example in a larger panel of 1581 now in the Musée des Beaux -Arts in Algiers (Bertier de Sauvigny p.68, fig. 13). The figures of the old lady with the barrow, the family to her right and the group in the right corner of the lord of the Manor greeting two other men recur all in another panel once with Nijstad (Bertier de Sauvigny p .81, fig. 28). 

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