Johnny Van Haeften Limited, London, Dutch and Flemish Old Master Paintings, Catalogue
No. 6, 1989, no. 21. 

An old label on the reverse is inscribed “Monsieur Arnold de Pret / Serie 2, No. 57, LOT 3”

Lucas van Uden was mainly active in Antwerp, where he was probably trained by his father Artus van Uden (b. 1544), town painter of Antwerp.  He registered in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke in 1626/27 as “the son of a master”.  Primarily a painter of landscapes, he was also a gifted draftsman and a printmaker.  According to his biographer Arnold Houbraken, Lucas often “awoke at the crack of dawn and went out to the fields and the woods”[i] to draw.  The chief influences on his stylistic development were the landscapes of the preceding generation of painters, most notably those of Jan Brueghel the Elder (1568-1625), Joos de Momper the Younger (1564-1635) and Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). 

Although snow scenes account for a relatively small portion of Van Uden’s output, they are among his most attractive works.  This beautifully signed and dated example depicts a broad panorama of the Flemish countryside taken from a slightly raised viewpoint.  A big freeze has set in and the ground is covered with a light dusting of snow.  In the left foreground, tall, slender trees reach their leafless branches towards the sky. On the right, in the valley below, village houses and a church nestle among the trees on the shores of a lake.  Countless small figures amuse themselves on the ice. In the foreground, countryfolk go about their daily business: a woman with a small child, and a man with his son and a dog trudge along a well-trodden track, while a man in a red jacket chops wood and another makes a bundle of faggots.  The wintry atmosphere is captured superbly in delicate shades of grey, white, green and blue.

Long popular in the context of cycles of the months and seasons, the winter landscape was introduced as an independent subject by Pieter Bruegel the Elder in his Winter Landscape with Skaters and a Bird-Trap[ii] of 1565.  The genre was popularised in the closing decades of the sixteenth century by such artists as Jacob (c. 1525-1590) and Abel Grimmer (c. 1573-1619) and Lucas van Valckenborch (1535-1597).  The tradition lost none of its appeal in the following century, but continued to flourish.  Among the artists who made a valuable contribution to its development was the Antwerp painter Joos de Momper the Younger (1564-1635), whose naturalistic renderings of the snow-covered landscape was an important source of inspiration for Van Uden’s own treatment of the subject. Vestiges of the earlier allegorical tradition are still present here in the small figures chopping and gathering up wood.

BIOGRAPHY

The landscape painter Lucas van Uden was born in Antwerp on 18 October 1595.  He was the son of Artus van Uden (b. 1544), town painter of Antwerp, and Joanna Tranoy, and a grandson of Pieter van Uden (fl. 1553), founder of a tapestry and silk factory in the city.  Lucas was probably trained by his father.  In 1626-27, he registered in the Antwerp Guild of St. Luke as a ‘wijnmeester’ (‘master’s son’).  On 14 February 1627, he married Anna van Woelput (d. 1667), with whom he had eight children

Apart from a trip along the Rhine between 1644 and 1646, and a visit to Brussels in 1649, Lucas van Uden spent most of his career in Antwerp.  Although there is no evidence that he ever worked in Rubens’s studio, as has sometimes been suggested, he was heavily indebted to the great master.  He made several more or less literal copies of Rubens’s compositions and appropriated a number of motifs from his paintings for his own use. 

Van Uden sometimes collaborated with other painters who added the figures in his landscapes, notably David Teniers the Younger (1610-1690) and Jan Brueghel the Younger (1601-1678).  However, more often, he painted the staffage in his own landscapes.  As well as being a painter, he was a prolific printmaker and a gifted draughtsman.  His biographer Arnold Houbraken, who praised him highly[iii], noted that he often “awoke at the crack of dawn and went out to the fields and the woods”to draw. 

Van Uden’s pupils included Jan Baptist Bonnecroy (1618-76), Philips Augustijn Immenraet (1627-79) and Gillis Neyts (1618/23-1678).  He also likely trained his son Adriaen van Uden (fl. 1655-6) and his daughter Maria van Uden, who married the painter Charles Emmanuel Biset.  Lucas van Uden died in Antwerp in 1672[iv].