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Vintage Signed Forest Path Oil Painting, Tree Lined Lane, 1949

Vintage Signed Forest Path Oil Painting, Tree Lined Lane, 1949

Regular price $1,485.00 USD
Regular price Sale price $1,485.00 USD
Sale Sold out

The light is the whole point of this one. It comes down the length of the lane in a single pale column and lands on the track in broken patches, and everything on either side, trunk after trunk, is built up in paint thick enough to throw a shadow of its own. Painted and dated 1949, signed in the lower left. The name has not led me anywhere in the records, so I am offering it as an unattributed hand, which is what it is.

Details
Artist
Bearing a signature reading "A. Van Aken." I checked the name against the Belgian and Dutch national art records, the standard reference dictionaries and the auction databases, and found no painter of that name working in 1949. The work is offered unattributed. Van Aken is a Flemish and Dutch surname.
Signature
Signed and dated in the lower left, painted in cream-white over the finished paint film, reading "A. Van Aken" above "1949"
Medium
Oil on canvas
Subject
A wooded lane running away from the viewer beneath a closing canopy, with the light opening at the far end
Origin
Continental European, likely Belgian
Age
1949, dated on the face
Canvas Size
23.5 in. W x 31.5 in. H
Frame Size
34.5 in. W x 42 in. H
Format
Upright rectangle
Frame
Vintage gilt frame, composition ornament over a wood core, gilded over a red bole ground that shows warm through the rubbed high points. Built in layers: a cream painted flat at the sight edge, a narrow gilt moulding, a band of small repeating ornament, a plain cove, then a wide outer band of acanthus scrollwork on a punched matte ground with shell and scroll cartouches at each corner. The vocabulary is Louis XIV revival.
Style
Impressionist handling, painted 1949. Broken colour, loaded impasto, and a subject worked for light rather than detail.
Support
Stretched canvas on a keyed wooden stretcher with a single horizontal crossbar, eight corner keys and further keys at the crossbar joints
Inscription
The stretcher crossbar carries a handwritten inscription in pencil, in two clusters. It is not legible.
Notes
The receding avenue of trees was a standard subject of Low Countries landscape painting, worked steadily by Belgian and Dutch painters from the nineteenth century well into the twentieth. Pictures like this one were made in quantity for the domestic market, which is why a capable hand turns up without a name attached to it.
Condition

The paint film is thickly worked throughout, heaviest in the foliage and the trunks, where the ridges stand proud enough to catch raking light, and thinner and more fluid in the track and in the bright opening at the end of the lane. No craquelure of the kind that develops in older oils is present, which is consistent with the 1949 date. No paint loss, tears, punctures or patches are visible on the painted surface. No cupping. Surface dirt is light. The stretcher is sound, keyed and intact, with all keys present, and the tacking edges are turned and secured over the stretcher on all four sides.

The frame carries the wear you would expect on a piece with this much undercut relief, and one real fault. At the upper right corner, a section of composition ornament has broken away from the outer band and is lost, leaving the white gesso ground exposed. This is stable. Separately, and at the same corner, the inner ornamented moulding has an open mitre that runs down through the ornament. There is a second, finer open mitre at the lower left, at the inner moulding and the cream flat, directly below the signature. The upper left and lower right corners are tight and their ornament is complete. Across all four rails there is rub to the gilt high points with the red bole showing through, a scatter of small losses and specks in the cream flat, and fine overall crackle in that flat. For a composition frame of this scale and this depth of ornament, the ornament survives unusually complete.

Please review all photographs closely, as they form part of this description.

 

#59

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