Italianate Landscape

Pynacker's 'Italianate Landscape' dated approximately 1670 in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen is particularly unusual for being executed on copper rather than the canvas or panel he typically used throughout his career. Copper supports were associated with the highest-quality, most detailed painting traditions in European art since the late sixteenth century: Flemish cabinet painters on copper (Adam Elsheimer, Jan Brueghel the Elder) produced extraordinarily fine and detailed work that exploited copper's perfectly smooth, non-absorbent surface for minute precision. Pynacker's choice of copper for a 1670 Italianate landscape suggests either a special commission for a connoisseur who valued the format's prestige, or a late career experiment with a different material register. The work's location in the Boijmans Van Beuningen — one of the great Dutch encyclopaedic collections — ensures its visibility within the context of Dutch Golden Age painting as a whole.

On copper, Pynacker's technique must adapt to the non-absorbent metallic surface, which requires an oil-based ground or lean priming before the paint layers are applied. The smooth copper allows extraordinarily fine detail work impossible on canvas or even panel, and any surviving copper Pynacker would be expected to show tighter foliage rendering and more precise figure description than his larger canvas works.