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The Vulture
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Willem van den Berg
The Vulture, 1930
Oil on board
42 1/8 x 26 1/16 inches (107.3 x 67.3 cm)
Signed and dated: ‘WILLEM VAN DEN BERG. 1930’
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Provenance

Possibly Sale Phillips, London, 15 October 1990, lot 141 ;

Private Collection, The Netherlands

 Willem van den Berg was born on February 16, 1886 in The Hague, where he first

trained with his father: Andries van den Berg, a painter, print-maker and art teacher. He

later enrolled at the local Academie voor Beeldende Kunst. Van den Berg also took study

trips to Belgium, Italy and England and worked with the Barbizon artists in France. One

of his paintings was exhibited at the Jeu de Paume in Paris in 1926. In 1935, Van den

Berg exhibited at the Art Institute of Chicago and he continued to paint and exhibit

internationally throughout his career. By 1938 he moved to Amsterdam, where he

became the director of the National Academy of Fine Arts and remained until his death

on 23 December 1970. In 1959 he received second prize at the International Art

Exhibition in Edinburgh.

 

Van den Berg painted still lifes, landscapes and portraits although he is mostly known for

renderings of peasants and Dutch fishermen. Besides paintings, he executed drawings,

linocuts and lithographs. Although Van den Berg was very much inspired by paintings by

Pieter Brueghel the Elder, as a result of his time among the Barbizon painters, a

connection to Jean François Millet is also evident.

 

Willem van den Berg often worked in the Amsterdam zoo Artis, executing drawings of

animals, later in the studio worked into lithographs or paintings. A large drawing of a

vulture, now in the collection of the Teylers Museum, seems to just outline the bird on a

branch. A woodcut of a vulture on a mountaintop, similar to the present painting, is in the

Gemeentemuseum, The Hague. Although it is generally believed that these works have

been executed after 1938 while Van den Berg was in Amsterdam, the woodcut bears the

inscription of the artists’ The Hague address, before he moved to Amsterdam. Another

woodcut of the same image, now in the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in

Amsterdam is dated 1925. An undated pastel, sold at Christie’s Amsterdam on 21

January 2003, lot 375, shows us the same bird atop a mountain looking in the same

direction as the other works on paper.

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