The tower of Kostverloren on the river Amstel

Described by John Smith as ‘an excellent work by the master,’ this unprepossessing masterpiece by the greatest of all Dutch landscape painters is appearing on the market for the first time in more than half a century. Its subject, the manor Kostverloren, was built around 1500 along the Amstel River, roughly five kilometres south of Amsterdam. Though known variously as Amstelhof, Brillenburg and, later, Ruijsschenstein, by 1525 it increasingly came to be described simply as Kostverloren (‘lost expenses’ or ‘money pit’) on account of the costs associated with maintaining its foundations on marshy land. Around 1650 the original structure fell victim to a fire, which gutted the house, sparing only its stepped gable tower. In 1658, the executors of the estate of Simon de Rijck, who had recently purchased the ruins, petitioned the trustees to have the ruined house demolished, its tower restored and a new house rebuilt on a lower foundation so that it could be leased and therefore generate revenue for the estate. According to a surviving bill, this work was swiftly undertaken between 10 May and 30 November of that year. The house was abandoned, its tower demolished by 1730, and finally bought for scrap in 1822 (for a full discussion of the manor’s history, see I.H. van Eeghen, ‘Rembrandt aan de Amstel’, in Rembrandt aan de Amstel, Amsterdam, 1969). Though virtually nothing of its structure remains today, at the end of the twentieth century plans were drawn up to reconstruct the house, but these ultimately never came to fruition (see M. van Meite, ‘Huis Kostverloren herrijst’, Ons Amsterdam, XLVII, 1995, pp. 108-111).

The site proved to be a magnetic one for a number of artists – Ruisdael, Hobbema, Jan van Kessel and Rembrandt, among others, all captured its picturesque ruins in drawing or paint in the years after 1650, while in the early decades of the seventeenth century its structure featured prominently in print series by Claes Jansz. Visscher and Simon Frisius dedicated to famous sites in and around Amsterdam. The manor’s popularity was no doubt due in part to its being a notable landmark for travellers, whether journeying by boat or along the road that tracked the bank of the Amstel. No neighbouring structure so prominently stood out against the flat Dutch landscape until the end of the seventeenth century. It similarly took on an almost heroic aura in arcadian poems like Hendrick Laurensz. Spiegel’s Hart-spieghel (1614), which accorded it the same vaunted status as sites from classical antiquity.

The present painting is based on a drawing, now in the Teylers Museum and one of the artist’s few surviving fully realized studies for a painting (fig. 1), which Ruisdael must have made in the late spring or early summer of 1658, shortly after the old structure was demolished and before its reconstruction. According to Seymour Slive, the painting is datable to the same year or shortly thereafter (Slive, op. cit., 2001). The site evidently held particular appeal for Ruisdael, who subsequently returned to it in at least two further paintings: one showing the early stages of the rebuilding process (Amsterdam Historical Museum); and another the premises shortly after reconstruction (present location unknown). A further drawing, presumably depicting the house shortly after reconstruction, is today in the Fondation Custodia, Paris. The ruin’s continued popularity as a subject for artists – tellingly, one of van Kessel’s paintings is dated 1664, some fifteen years after it burned – suggests that, much like depictions of the Oude Stadhuis in Amsterdam (burned 1652), the Mariakerk in Utrecht (partially destroyed in 1576) and the Huis ter Kleef in Haarlem (destroyed 1573), its dignified dishabille enjoyed a mythic status in the contemporary Dutch imagination.