Gillis Neyts (Overijse circa 1618-1687 Antwerp)

Overshadowed by the serpentine branches of a monumental tree, a young couple are watched by a man who stands on a ladder among the leaves. Their amicable tussle suggests that they are lovers, although the figure on the ladder has also been interpreted as a sign that they are harvesting apples. They were added later by the artist, in a slightly different shade of ink, which suggests that Neyts felt obliged to add a narrative component to a drawing which had been executed primarily for its natural grandeur. He had a lifelong fascination with the forms of gnarled and twisted trees, and the spirited draughtsmanship of the trunk and branches in the present drawing give this tree an almost fantastical sense of life and energy. It is one of four horizontal studies which place Neyts's expressive trees within a slightly broader landscape setting and, in its high level of finish, it appears to have been intended as a completed work in its own right. In size and finish, as well as in the Latinised form of its signature (Aegidius rather than Gillis), it is very close to the Landscape with an old tree to the left and figures in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which must have been executed at the same date (New York and Edinburgh, op. cit., fig. 55). The two other horizontal compositions of a similar type are the Marsh landscape in the Klassik Stiftung, Weimar, and the Landscape in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (Gustot, op. cit., nos. D. 238 and D. 236 respectively). Stijn Alsteens has suggested that this group of drawings should be seen as slightly later than the upright tree studies by Neyts such as that in the collection of Jean Bonna in Geneva, although they probably predate Neyts's move to Namur in 1665 (New York and Edinburgh, op. cit., no. 51).