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Overview
Adriaen van der Cabel or Ary van der Touw (1631–1705), was a Dutch Golden Age landscape painter and etcher active in France and Italy. He was born and grew up in the small town of Rijswijk, near The Hague. Cabel was also known as Ary. According to Houbraken, he was a student of Jan van Goyen, and his real name was van der Touw (English: "of String"), but that wasn't grand enough according to Van Goyen, so he changed it to mean "of Cable". Cabel moved to Lyon as a young man in 1655 and spent most of the rest of his life there apart from a stint in Rome (1659-66). His work is sometimes confused with that of his brother Engel van der Cabel (1641-after 1695), also known as Ange or Angelo. Engel accompanied his brother on his travels and they both married on the same day. Like his brother, Engel became a member of the Bentvueghels, a long established art group of Dutch artists who worked in Southern Europe, painting under the pseudonym of 'Geestigheid'.
This landscape scene, rather Italianate in character, depicts a beggar in the central foreground, sitting against a wall leading to a derelict square tower with battlements. A woman walks past the begger on the right. a village and finally a mountain in the background. In the bottom left is a pond or small lake with a boatman. The etching is Plate 3 of a series of six prints with landscape themes.
Sources:
British Museum Collection online, https://www.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=3063784&partId=1&am p;searchText=adriaen+van+der+cabel+beggar&page=1
Wikipedia, 'Adriaen van der Cabel', https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adriaen_van_der_Cabel
Dr Mark Stocker Curator, Historical International Art April 2019