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Willem Schellinks
Dutch, 1627? - 1678
Dutch draughtsman, painter, etcher and poet. He was the oldest surviving son of Laurens Schellinks, tailor and freeman of Amsterdam, and Catalijntje Kousenaer. Laurens originally came from Maasbree (Limburg) but established himself in Amsterdam in 1609. There were seven other children, of whom Daniel Schellinks (1627–1701) also became a painter.
Although Willem Schellinks is said to have been apprenticed to Karel Du Jardin, there is no factual or stylistic evidence to support this assumption. His earliest known works, a group of drawings of Amsterdam houses and details from them, show his interest in topographical subjects. They are drawn from life and can be associated stylistically with a sheet dated 1642 of the Steps of the St Elisabeth Hospital in Amsterdam (Leiden, Rijksuniv., Prentenkab.). These early drawings are executed mainly in black chalk and grey wash.
In 1646 Schellinks travelled through France with Lambert Doomer. Their journey is recorded in a diary kept by Schellinks (Copenhagen, Kon. Bib., MS. Ny.Kgl.S.370; later copy, Oxford, Bodleian Lib., MS. 17436/8) and in a large number of topographical drawings by both artists (e.g. View of the Château de Blois on the Loire, Vienna, Nbib., Atlas van der Hem). By this time Schellinks preferred pen and ink to chalk, and, no doubt influenced by the work of his more talented travelling companion, he used wash to create more atmospheric effects. Schellinks occasionally used sketches from this journey for his subsequent paintings.
Soon after his trip to France Schellinks began to depict Italianate subject-matter in both drawings and paintings . Even though he had not yet visited Italy, he sought inspiration in the work of other Dutch Italianates. He was influenced principally by the work of Jan Asselijn in such paintings as City Wall in Winter (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) and, to a lesser extent, by the work of Jan Both (e.g. Schellinks’s drawing View of the Ripa Grande, Leiden, Rijksuniv., Prentenkab., with Both’s version of the same subject, Frankfurt am Main, Städel. Kstinst.). In these years Schellinks published a number of poems in a series of anthologies, De Olipodrigo (Amsterdam, 1654–5), which were accompanied by four of his own etchings.
From 1661 to 1665 Schellinks undertook another journey, this time as tutor to the 13-year-old son of the Amsterdam merchant Jacob Thierry. This tour through France, England, Italy, Malta and Germany was also recorded in the artist’s diary and in a series of topographical sketches and landscape drawings (facsimile published as Viaggio al sud, Rome, 1983). The trip was financed in part by the rich Amsterdam merchant and art collector Laurens van der Hem, who had a particular interest in topography. On his return Schellinks expanded dozens of the sketches he had made on the journey into large, panoramic drawings, often on several sheets of paper and measuring as large as 468×1045 mm. These constitute the high point of his oeuvre and were included along with earlier drawings in the Atlas maior assembled by Johannes Blaeu and later in the possession of van der Hem. The drawings by Schellinks make up about 120 pages of the atlas, which is preserved intact (Vienna, Nbib., Atlas of Prince Eugene or Atlas van der Hem). Schellinks’s panoramic drawings are executed mainly in pen and ink with brown and grey wash and are richly detailed, painstaking in their rendering of topography and splendid in their use of atmospheric perspective. Compositionally, they are related to the graphic work of Israël Silvestre, examples of which are also in the Atlas van der Hem.
During his stay in Italy Schellinks was admitted to the group of Dutch artists in Rome known as the Schildersbent, whose members were called ‘Bentvueghels’; they gave him the nickname ‘Spits’ (Dut.: ‘Point’ or ‘Peak’, metaphorically applied to someone of quick wit and initiative). In 1667 he married Maria Neus (d 1678), the widow of the Amsterdam engraver and bookseller Dancker Danckerts (1634–66); they had seven children. During these years he painted several versions of the Medway disaster, a maritime battle of 1667 led by the Dutch seafaring hero Michiel de Ruyter. These marine works (e.g. the Burning of the English Fleet near Chatham, Amsterdam, Kon. Coll. Zeemanschap, on loan to Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) are characterized by the same panoramic composition as his drawings in the Atlas van der Hem. After Schellinks’s death, his colleagues Frederik de Moucheron and Nicolaes Berchem completed a number of his paintings. Schellinks left a considerable estate of 20,000 guilders.
Pierre F. M. Mens. " Schellinks, Willem." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T076480 (accessed May 8, 2012).
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