Philips Wouwerman

Philips Wouwerman was baptized on 24 May 1619 in Haarlem, in the Dutch Republic; no independent birth record survives, so his birth date is conventionally given as the baptism date. He was the eldest son of the painter Paulus (Powels) Joosten Wouwerman, and is thought to have begun his training in his father's Haarlem workshop, though no work from that period has been identified. Early biographer Cornelis de Bie also claimed that Wouwerman studied with Frans Hals and Pieter Verbeeck, but this is a traditional attribution rather than an archivally confirmed fact. His mature style shows a clearer, better documented debt to Pieter van Laer, the Dutch painter of Roman street life known as Bamboccio.

Wouwerman spent a brief period in Hamburg at the end of the 1630s before returning to Haarlem, where he was admitted to the Guild of St. Luke, the painters' guild, in 1640. He worked in Haarlem for the rest of his career. He was, by contemporary and near contemporary accounts, a celebrated and prosperous painter in his own lifetime, and his output was large: a nineteenth century catalogue by the English connoisseur John Smith (1829, supplemented 1842) attributed some 800 paintings to him, a figure modern scholarship regards as inflated by workshop production and imitators working in his style. Wouwerman died in Haarlem on 19 May 1668 and was buried on 23 May 1668 in the Nieuwe Kerk there.

Modern scholarship treats Wouwerman as the leading Dutch specialist in painting horses. The art historian Frederik J. Duparc, whose research underpins most current biographical accounts, is widely credited in museum literature with the assessment that Wouwerman was the most accomplished and successful Dutch painter of horses of the seventeenth century. That reputation has come with renewed scrutiny of his enormous attributed output: the international curatorial network CODART has hosted research and discussion on long-standing questions about Wouwerman's use of, and possible close copying from, drawings by Pieter van Laer, part of a broader effort to separate autograph works from studio and imitator production. A reported 2009 to 2010 retrospective, traveling from the Gemaldegalerie Alte Meister in Kassel to the Mauritshuis in The Hague, is credited with renewing institutional and scholarly attention to his work.

Wouwerman's market is a secondary, Old Master market rather than a primary gallery market: there is no living artist or estate, and his paintings move through specialist Old Master dealers and major auction houses such as Christie's, Sotheby's, and Lempertz whenever they come up for sale. The highest price for a work by Wouwerman that can be documented with a title, price, house, and date is Depart for a Falconery, which sold for EUR 341,600 at Lempertz, Cologne, on 23 November 2013; because comprehensive Christie's and Sotheby's Old Master archives are only partly accessible, this should be read as the best documented result rather than a confirmed absolute record. His paintings were already in demand during his lifetime and, by most accounts, became even more sought after in the eighteenth century, helped by the French printmaker Jean Moyreau, who published 89 engravings after Wouwerman's compositions between 1737 and 1759 and spread his work across Europe.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Wouwerman in the modern sense; the closest historical equivalent, John Smith's 1829/1842 catalogue of roughly 800 works, is now understood to include a substantial amount of workshop and imitator material, which makes provenance and connoisseurship central to any purchase decision. Because there is no gallery or estate to represent the artist, works surface through Old Master specialist dealers and the major auction houses, and sales at the top of the market are infrequent enough that any single result, including the highest price on record, should be read with caution rather than treated as a stable benchmark. Deep museum representation across Europe and North America is the strongest signal of Wouwerman's lasting standing, even where individual attributions or auction figures carry some uncertainty.