Aert van der Neer was a landscape painter best known for his moonlight and winter scenes. He also specialised in landscapes at dawn and dusk and paintings depicting fires. His paintings are influenced more by Flemish painting than by works of his Amsterdam contemporaries.
Van der Neer is first recorded at Gorinchem in south Holland, where he worked - according to his biographer, Houbraken - as the steward of a family living there. By 1630 he had moved to Amsterdam, where he devoted himself to painting, and where his son, the figure and portrait painter, Eglon Hendrick van der Neer, was born. Van der Neer kept an inn in Amsterdam from 1659. He was declared bankrupt in 1662.
Aert van der Neer
1603/4 - 1677
Paintings by Aert van der Neer
(Showing 6 of 9 works)
From the 1640s to the 1660s the Low Countries experienced a series of severe winters, and canals and rivers froze hard for weeks at a time. This wintry transformation of the towns and landscapes caught the imagination of many local artists, and Aert van der Neer was one of those who specialised i...
Not on display
The game of golf was played in the Middle Ages, but it became particularly popular in seventeenth-century Holland. It was called kolf, and was played on the ice. European winters in the mid-seventeenth century were severe. Rivers and canals froze so solid that the life normally lived in a village...
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Aert van der Neer was a specialist in painting landscapes with distinctive lighting effects – often under moonlight, or at the beginning or end of the day. The title given to this painting (probably in the eighteenth or nineteenth century) suggests that it’s set in the evening, though the cold bl...
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Many of Aert van der Neer’s atmospheric landscapes are set in the low light of evening or early morning, characterised by a silvery glow on water and the deep shade of the wooded banks. He also painted night scenes, lit by a moon often partly hidden by the clouds of a dramatic sky. It’s not clear...
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Aert van der Neer was one of the most successful specialists in moonlit landscapes, and this is one of many he painted. The moon here has appeared only briefly, breaking through a tiny gap in a cloudy sky. The cool light creates a contrast between the deep darkness in the shadowy outlines of the...
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This is one of Aert van der Neer’s largest paintings. A river takes centre stage, stretching into the middle distance beyond and reflecting back the slanting light of an evening sky and the darker shadows of the boats and trees.These effects and this mood are typical of van der Neer’s work, but u...
Not on display
Nowadays, many of us have little experience of clear moonlight – it’s often washed out by street lights or car headlamps. But in the seventeenth century the many moods and lighting effects of the night sky and the different phases and heights of the moon would have been a familiar part of everyda...
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Aert van der Neer was an expert at creating a sense of depth in his landscapes. Often, as here, he used the sinuous path of a river or inlet receding into the distance to emphasise the effect. In this picture he has gone a step further, using figures to reinforce that recession and to inject a se...
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Although the vast majority of the picture is taken up by the landscape, our perception of it hinges on the two figures standing in the gateway. The angle created by the dead tree and stumps in the left foreground guides our gaze to them, as does the red dress of the milkmaid, which stands out str...
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You've viewed 6 of 9 paintings