Nicolaes Pietersz Berchem (Haarlem 1620 - Amsterdam 1683)

Bucolic Landscape Sunset Flandre Oil on canvas Paint 17th Century Old master Art

1650-1699

Quality work attributed to the painter Peter Van Der Velde (Antwerp 1634 - c.1714)  Coastal view with fortified city and boats (city of Antwerp?) Oil pa...

Giovanni Grevenbroeck, called the Solfarolo (Netherlands, c. 1650 - Milan, post 1699) Port View in Moonlight Oil on canvas 70 x 132 cm Framed 86 x 146 cm Critical apparatus: Exper...

Aeneas and Dido Attributed to Pseudo-Caroselli (Rome, active c. 1630/1650) Oil on canvas (148 × 93 cm. - framed 162 × 107 cm.) (full details LINK) The episode depicted in the superb...

Étienne Jeaurat (Vermenton 1699 - Versailles 1789) Game of children intent on harvesting grain (Allegory of Summer) Mid-18th century Oil on canvas 97 x 129 cm - Framed cm. 112 x 14...

17th century Dutch Old Master Riverside Landscape with fishermen This riverside landscape is filled with remarkable detail. The longer one looks, the more one discovers. From the ca...

17th century Dutch old master painting "A summer day in Kleve in 1661" Our painting depicting a whimsical vibrant blue sky, was long believed to depict an Italian landscape. However...

PIETRO MONTANINI (Perugia, Italy, 1619 - 1689) Title: Landscape Medium: Oil on canvas Dimensions: without frame 50 x 65 cm - with frame 64 x 79 cm An...

The Great Fire of London in September 1666 was one of the greatest disasters in the city’s history. The City, with its wooden houses crowded together in narrow streets, was a natural fire risk, and predictions that London would burn down became a shocking reality. The fire began in a bakery in Pudding Lane, an area near the Thames teeming with warehouses and shops full of flammable materials, such as timber, oil, coal, pitch and turpentine. Inevitably the fire spread rapidly from this area into the City. Our painting depicts the impact of the fire on those who were caught in it and creates a very dramatic impression of what the fire was like. Closer inspection reveals a scene of chaos and panic with people running out of the gates. It shows Cripplegate in the north of the City, with St Giles without Cripplegate to its left, in flames (on the site of the present day Barbican). The painting probably represents the fire on the night of Tuesday 4 September, when four-fifths of the City was burning at once, including St Paul's Cathedral. Old St Paul’s can be seen to the right of the canvas, the medieval church with its thick stone walls, was considered a place of safety, but the building was covered in wooden scaffolding as it was in the midst of being restored by the then little known architect, Christopher Wren and caught fire. Our painting seems to depict a specific moment on the Tuesday night when the lead on St Paul’s caught fire and, as the diarist John Evelyn described: ‘the stones of Paul’s flew like grenades, the melting lead running down the streets in a stream and the very pavements glowing with the firey redness, so as no horse, nor man, was able to tread on them.’ Although the loss of life was minimal, some accounts record only sixteen perished, the magnitude of the property loss was shocking – some four hundred and thirty acres, about eighty per cent of the City proper was destroyed, including over thirteen thousand houses, eighty-nine churches, and fifty-two Guild Halls. Thousands were homeless and financially ruined. The Great Fire, and the subsequent fire of 1676, which destroyed over six hundred houses south of the Thames, changed the appearance of London forever. The one constructive outcome of the Great Fire was that the plague, which had devastated the population of London since 1665, diminished greatly, due to the mass death of the plague-carrying rats in the blaze. The fire was widely reported in eyewitness accounts, newspapers, letters and diaries. Samuel Pepys recorded climbing the steeple of Barking Church from which he viewed the destroyed City: ‘the saddest sight of desolation that I ever saw.’ There was an official enquiry into the causes of the fire, petitions to the King and Lord Mayor to rebuild, new legislation and building Acts. Naturally, the fire became a dramatic and extremely popular subject for painters and engravers. A group of works relatively closely related to the present picture have been traditionally ascribed to Jan Griffier...