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.