Dirck Theodor Helmbreeker

DIRCK THEODOR HELMBREEKER (1633 - 1696).
"Landscape with peasants".
Oil on canvas
Relined.
Signed "T.H." in the lower right corner.
Measurements: 94 x 125 cm; 115 x 146 cm (frame).

Dirck Theodor Helmbreeker developed a type of genre scenes in which the landscape occupies a predominant place, so that the peasants are dwarfed by the sublimity of nature. The painting in question is evidence of this interest in placing people in leafy landscapes. A woman carries a bundle of branches, her husband rides a horse and whips the cows with a stick to make them move forward. They are accompanied by a child and two sheepdogs. The family creates a bucolic scene, which in turn is set in an idealized landscape. This painting responds to the genre developed by Dutch painters who settled in Rome in the seventeenth century. They were the bamboccianti, to whose group Dirck Theodor Helmbreeker belonged. Despite their humble subject matter, the works found appreciation among elite collectors because the treatment of the landscape was majestic.

Dirck Theodor Helmbreeker was a Dutch painter of the Golden Age, author of Italianate landscapes. He was born in Haarlem and was a disciple of Pieter de Grebber. He traveled to Rome at a very young age, where he remained until his death. His paintings belong to the group of artists known as the Bamboccianti, or, as Houbraken writes, Bamboots, which is a specialization of Northern artists in small-scale genre scenes in the manner of Pieter van Laer during his stay in Rome. Helmbreker arrived in Italy in 1654 and settled in Rome by the end of the decade. By the late 1670s, he and the Flemish painter Willem Reuter were part of a group known as the "Congregazione dei Virtuosi al Pantheon." The Congregazione counted among its members many important artists who left their mark in Rome. It was influenced by Sébastien Bourdon. His genre scenes, which were part of the last generation of the Bamboccianti, tended to be more classically inspired than many of his earlier underworld scenes. Ultimately, these works were a great success with Italian collectors. In 1695 he was commissioned to paint the main altarpiece of the church of St. Julian of the Flemish in Rome. The historian Houbraken described a 1681 painting in the possession of Pieter Klok showing an Italian monastery with a group of poor people in the foreground with various handicaps being given soup from a large cauldron by a Franciscan friar. Helmbreker was very religious and made many donations to the poor in Rome.