Summer Landscape

This little copper plate was painted as the summer half of a pair, with a winter landscape of the same size as its partner. Here the trees are in full leaf, ducks paddle on the water and a party of people is out in a boat. Landscapes like this, full of everyday activity that buyers could recognise from their own lives, sold easily in the Netherlands around 1615.

The two pictures never seem to have been separated. They belonged to the De Witte van Citters family in Middelburg, the Zeeland town where Van den Berghe worked, and later to the Hague collector Arnoldus Andries des Tombe. When des Tombe died, his bequest reached the Mauritshuis in 1903, and the same bequest brought the museum Vermeer's Girl with a Pearl Earring.