Leemans Brothers

Galerie Moderne, from Belgium, sells on 9 September 2019 an "anonymous, 17th century" "Dog in a landscape", estimated at 2,000 to 3,000 Euro.

The painting isn't terribly well executed, but has some rather intriguing elements in it. It turns out to be a collection of bird hunting equipment. More importantly, some of the exact same elements can be found on better works, giving us a name and period for this work as well.

The largest, horizontal bird cage can be seen nearly identical in works by Johannes Leemans (1633-1688), a painter of trompe-l'oeils with hunting papaphernalia. One of those was sold at Christie's in 2009 for 49,000 Euro. A very similar one is in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels.

Another one with a very similar cage (and especially the cloth on top) also has the same bag (or whatever it is) below it. This one was sold at Sotheby's in 2001 for £14,000, not as the work of Johannes Leemans but by his slightly older brother Anthonie Leemans (1631-1673). Even the position of the bag in front of the cage, and the horizontal "arrows"(?) behind it, are nearly the same, and some other more mysterious elements are comparable as well.

The main differences are that the painting for sale is in much worse condition, and seems to have been painted by a follower of the Leemanses, not directly by either of the two brothers. As a "follower of Anthonie Leemans", it should be worth the estimate, if you can find a bidder willing to look past the damage.

As an aside, I wonder at the business model of such one-trick ponies as the two Leemanses. They were competent painters, and the produced quite a few of these works: but if you only sell one product, and the taste or fashion changes, then you suddenly are very vulnerable. It's bad enough if your style gets outdated by new painters, but if you then only have one subject, and basically just one composition (like Johannes here), then it may get hard to scrape a living from these.

UPDATE: unsold, again for sale on 20 January 2020 at Galerie Moderne with a very reasonable 1,000 Euro estimate.