Hands of a Rommelpot Player

c. 1654 - c. 1658

Object data

black chalk, oiled charcoal; framing lines in brown and black ink

height 92 mm × width 150 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed on verso: centre, in graphite, C: Visscher f; next to this, in pencil, 3; lower left, in black chalk, C.Visscher
stamped on verso: lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

Watermark: None

Condition

Stains

Provenance

…; sale, Gerard Sanders (1702-67, Rotterdam), Rotterdam (J. Tiele), 5 Augustus 1767, no. 47 (‘Een kinderhooftje en rommelpot, met zwart kryt, door Cornelis Visser, twee stuks op een blad’); …; sale, J.G. Cramer, Amsterdam (J.M. Cok), 13 November 1769 sqq., Album H, no. 433 (‘Een fraai studietje, met zwart kryt, zynde twee handen speelende op een rommelpot’); …; sale, Jan Kobell II (1778-1814, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (W. Luitjes), 24 May 1815 sqq., Album B, no. 19 (‘Een blad met twee handen een rommelpot vasthoudende, fraai met z. krijt, door C. Visscher’), fl. 5:50:-, to ‘Dawalle’;¹ …; sale, Paul Theodore van Hoorn (1811-62, Adegeest, near Voorschoten) et al., Amsterdam (F. Muller), 13 November 1894 sqq., no. 902, fl. 9, to the dealer H.J. Valk for the museum (L. 2228)

Object number: RP-T-1895-A-3076

The artist

Cornelis Visscher (Haarlem 1628/29 - 1658 Amsterdam)

Little is known about his early life. Information regarding his birth is based on two surviving self-portraits, one from 1649 in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1895,0915.1343), and the other, dated 10 April 1653, in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4624). He was presumably born in Haarlem, where he became a member of the Guild of St Luke in 1653. His father – who cannot be identified – must have been an artist as well, because in the admission book of the guild Visscher is described as ‘plaetsnijder en Meester outste zoon’ (‘engraver and the master’s oldest son’). Two younger brothers, Jan Visscher (1633/34-1712) and Lambert Visscher (1630/32-after 1690), also pursued artistic careers. The relationship between Cornelis and the relatively unknown painter Cornelis de Visscher (c. 1530-c. 1586) of Gouda is unclear. According to Van Mander, the latter was a skilled portraitist, but had some mental issues and died in a shipwreck on the North Sea.² Perhaps the same person can be identified with Cornelis de Visscher, whose money was managed (presumably on behalf of his under-age children) by the orphans’ board of Gouda because he was considered mentally ill; in 1622, the widow of Cornelis’ brother, the painter Gerrit Gerritsz. de Visscher II (c. 1559-before 1622), collected the money from the orphans’ board on behalf of Cornelis’ two nephews, her sons Gerrit de Visscher III (?-?), a goldsmith living in Gouda, and Barent de Visscher (?-?).³

Cornelis Visscher probably received his first artistic training from his father. Later he must have been apprenticed to the Haarlem painter, engraver and draughtsman Pieter Soutman (1593/1601-1657), with whom he collaborated on several print series in 1649/50. Shortly after his admission in the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem, he moved to Amsterdam. In the 1650s, he received numerous commissions for portrait drawings and engravings of Haarlem and Amsterdam scholars, clergymen and writers, including Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-H-P-41). One of his last commissions was an engraved portrait of Constantijn Huygens I (1596-1687) after a lost drawing by the sitter’s son Christiaan Huygens (1629-95), which was included as the frontispiece to Huygens’ poem book Koren-bloemen (1658) (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-27.428). It was finished in the last months of 1657, when the artist was presumably suffering from ‘de steen’ (kidney stones). Visscher died the following year and was buried on 16 January in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam. Despite his short life – he was only twenty-eight years old when he died – Visscher left an extensive oeuvre, consisting of more than 100 drawings and some 185 prints.

Marleen Ram, 2019

References
R. van Eijnden and A. van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst, 4 vols., Haarlem 1816-40, I (1816), pp. 71-77, IV (1840), pp. 96-97; P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, pp. 100-01; R.E.O. Ekkart, ‘Visscher, Cornelis (de)’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., London/New York 1996, XXXII, pp. 622-23; J. Hawley, ‘An Introduction to the Life and Drawings of Jan de Vissccher’, Master Drawings 52 (2014), no. 1, pp. 59-94; J. Hawley, ‘Cornelis Visscher and Constantijn Huygens’s Koren-bloemen’, Print Quarterly 32 (2015), no. 1, pp. 51-53

Entry

This figure, of which only the hands are depicted, is playing a ‘rommelpot’, a simple instrument made from a pig’s bladder stretched taut over an earthenware pot and pierced with a thick piece of straw. By moving the straw back and forth with moistened fingers, a low, rumbling sound is produced.⁴

The drawing suffered the same fate as two other drawings by Visscher in the museum’s collection (inv. nos. RP-T-1902-A-4628 and RP-T-1902-A-4629): it was once part of a larger sheet with multiple studies, which was cut up in order to create yet more drawings. In 1767, at the sale of Gerard Sanders (1702-1767), the museum’s drawing was described as: ‘Een kinderhooftje en rommelpot, met zwart kryt, door Cornelis Visser, twee stuks op een blad’ (‘A head of a child and a rommelpot player, by Cornelis Visser, two pieces on one sheet’).⁵ Two years later, it resurfaced on the art market, but this time without the second study of a head of a child.⁶ The second drawing that once belonged to the original sheet can possibly be identified with Visscher’s Study of the Head of a Child in the Amsterdam Museum (inv. no. TA 10361).⁷ Between 1767 and 1769, the original sheet must have been divided in two by a dealer or collector, who sought to increase profits by satisfying market demands for particularly rare or valuable artists.⁸

The present drawing, its putative former companion piece (the Study of the Head of a Child in the Amsterdam Museum) and, for instance, the Drapery-covered Hand and Arm in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden (inv. no. C 1043),⁹ are good examples of a category of drawing for which Visscher was less well known: namely, black chalk studies on paper. Characteristic for these non-portrait works is the confident handling of chalk, which is freely used to alternate between detailed and sketchily drawn parts. In the present drawing, the hands are executed with the greatest care, whereas the sleeves, the ‘rommelpot’ and the straw are done in a very loose manner. Moreover, some of the contours and shadows are enhanced with boldly drawn lines in oiled charcoal, which makes the carefully rendered hands stand out even more. This drawing style can be found in Visscher’s later works from circa 1654-58, such as the Portrait of a Man of 1654 in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem (inv. no. P+ 051).¹⁰ These drawings seem to reveal the influence of Antony van Dyck (1599-1641), whose fluently drawn portraits Visscher copied at least once.¹¹

Bonny van Sighem, 2000/Marleen Ram, 2019

Literature

P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, no. 98, p. 100 (fig. 4); W.W. Robinson, Seventeenth-century Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Vienna (Graphische Sammlung Albertina)/New York (Pierpont Morgan Library)/Cambridge (MA) (Fogg Art Museum) 1991-92, p. 200 (n. 1); B.P.J. Broos and M. Schapelhouman, Nederlandse tekenaars geboren tussen 1600 en 1660, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1993 (Oude tekeningen in het bezit van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, waaronder de collectie Fodor, vol. 4), p. 209, under no. 164; E. de Jongh and G. Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life: Genreprints in the Netherlands, 1550-1700, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1997, p. 230, under no. 45 (fig. 3); M.C. Plomp, The Dutch Drawings in the Teyler Museum, II: Artists Born between 1575 and 1630, coll. cat. Haarlem 1997, p. 431, under no. 512; A. Stefes, Niederländische Zeichnungen, 1450-1800, 3 vols., coll. cat. Hamburg 2011 (Die Sammlungen der Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett, vol. 2), p. 580, under no. 1106 (n. 4); J. Hawley, ‘An Introduction to the Life and Drawings of Jan de Visscher’, Master Drawings 52 (2014), no. 1, p. 70 (fig. 15); J. Hawley and M. Ram, ‘Reconstructing a Cut-up Sheet by Cornelis Visscher’, Master Drawings 56 (2018), no. 2, p. 191 (fig. 13)

Citation

B. van Sighem, 2000/M. Ram, 2019, 'Cornelis (II) Visscher, Hands of a Rommelpot Player, c. 1654 - c. 1658', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.63624

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