An extensive Rhenish landscape with peasants and animals resting in the shade of Romanesque ruins

Painting mostly sea and harbor views in the tradition of Jan Baptist Weenix, Hendrik van Minderhout was born in Rotterdam in the early 1630s and spent most of his career in Bruges and Antwerp. Minderhout entered the Guild of St. Luke in 1663 in Bruges, and moved to Antwerp in 1672. A smaller version of this view, likely a copy, was sold at Christie’s, New York, 11 January 1979, lot 165. The capriccio in the distance at left has been identified as the Valkhof on the Rhine at Nijmegen.

The present painting was owned by the Talbots of Malahide Castle, a medieval castle and demesne outside of Dublin. Given to Richard Talbot by Henry II for his services to the crown in 1185, the Talbot family lived at Malahide Castle for almost eight centuries, interrupted only between 1649-60 when their lands were seized by Cromwell’s forces. The wife of the fifth baron was a descendant of James Boswell, the famed biographer of Dr. Samuel Johnson, and his papers were found at the castle and sold to Yale University in the twentieth century. Malahide Castle was sold to the Irish state in 1975, and the Hon. Rose Malahide, sister to the final Baron de Malahide, disposed of a great deal of the contents and furnishings at a sale at Christie’s London in 1976, including this painting. Some items were purchased by private benefactors and the government and restored to the castle, which is now open to the public by appointment.