Italianate Landscape

Jan Asselijn painted this southern scene in Amsterdam around 1650 to 1652, years after he had come home from Italy and very near the end of his life. He was buried in the city in October 1652. In the lower left he signed it with his initials, the J and the A joined into a single letter.

The canvas is recorded in Vienna in 1844, in the collection of the Counts Czernin, and it was still listed in their catalogue in 1936. That family gallery was one of the best known in Europe, and for over a century it also owned Vermeer's Art of Painting. In 1962 Asselijn's landscape turned up at a London dealer, and the Friends of the Mauritshuis Foundation bought it. The Friends own it to this day and have lent it to the Mauritshuis ever since, and it hangs in the museum's second venue, the Gallery Prince Willem V in The Hague.