View enlargement
Zoom image
Email to a friend
Print this page
Jan van Scorel
Netherlandish, 1495-1562
Landscape with Tournament and Hunters, 1519/20
Oil on panel
57.8 x 138.5 cm (22 3/4 x 54 9/16 in.)
George F. Harding Collection, 1990.560
This landscape was painted by the young Jan van Scorel as he traveled from northern Italy to Rome to study antiquities and the new Renaissance style. It was executed on poplar, a type of wooden support common in Italy, and its elongated format suggests that it was set into paneling as part of a room decoration. The painting celebrates two aristocratic pastimes, jousting and hunting; Scorel used a 1506 woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder as the model for the lively crowd watching the joust. Italian patrons were particularly drawn to the Northern European vision of chivalric subjects and courtly pursuits, and the jousting theme was no doubt requested of the young Dutch painter, who showed a talent for combining small active figures in a landscape setting.
— Permanent collection label
Exhibition, Publication and Ownership Histories
Exhibition History
New York, Corona Mundi International Art Center (Roerich Museum), Exhibition of Old Masters, 1927, no. 1, as Vinckboons.
Art Institute of Chicago, On the Road to Italy: Early Paintings by Dutch Renaissance Master Jan van Scorel, 1998 (no cat.).
Publication History
Friedrich Winkler, “Jan Scorel oder “Zuan Fiamengo,” Oud Holland 48 (1931), p. 176, fig. 2.
M[olly] F[aries], in Fiamminghi a Roma, 1508–1608, exh. cat., Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, and Rome, Palazzo delle Esposizioni, 1995, p. 255, under no. 179.
Molly Faries and Martha Wolff, “Landscape in the Early Paint ings of Jan van Scorel,” Burlington Magazine 138 (1996), pp. 724–33, figs. 2, 5, 17, 18.
Molly Faries, “Scorel, Jan van,” in Dictionary of Art, vol. 28, 1996, p. 216.
Monika Anne Schmitter, “7e Display of Distinction: Art Collecting and Social Status in Early Sixteenth-Century Venice,” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 1997, pp. 69, 76.
Molly Faries, “Jan van Scorel’s Jerusalem Landscapes,” in In Detail: New Studies of Northern Renaissance Art in Honor of Walter S. Gibson, ed. Laurinda S. Dixon, Turnhout, 1998, pp. 114–16, 128, 131, fig. 2.
Jill Dunkerton, “North and South: Painting Techniques in Venice,” in Renaissance Venice and the North: Crosscurrents in the Time of Bellini, Dürer and Titian, exh. cat., ed. Bernard Aikema and Beverly Louise Brown, Venice, Palazzo Grassi, 1999, p.
102.
Beverly Louise Brown, in Renaissance Venice and the North, p. 462, under no. 125.
Molly Faries, “Another New Early Jan van Scorel,” in Polyptiek: Een veelluik van Groninger bijdragen aan de kunstgeschiedenis, ed. Henk Th. van Veen et al., Zwolle, 2002, pp. 42–44, 47, 221–22.
Martha Wolff in Martha Wolff et al., Northern European and Spanish Paintings before 1600 in the Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago, 2008, pp. 297-301, ill.
Ownership History
R. Sabelsky, Saint Petersburg.4 Roerich Museum, New York, by 1927 [according to the catalogue of the Roerich sale]; sold, American Art Association, Anderson Galleries, New York, Mar. 27–28, 1930, no. 128. George F. Harding, Jr. (d. 1939), Chicago; bequeathed to the George F. Harding Museum, Chicago; ownership transferred to the Art Institute, 1982; accessioned, 1990.
