Rijksmuseum

Object data

black chalk; framing line in brown ink

height 144 mm × width 188 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed by the artist: upper centre, in black chalk, velsen
inscribed on verso, in pencil: lower centre, by Hofstede de Groot, T 97 299 / H 141 / B 188; next to that, 17; lower left, N + S; next to that, Ruysdael; upper centre, +
stamped on verso: center right, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

Watermark: Upper part of a shield surmounted by a crown

Condition

Light foxing throughout; the sheet has been irregularly trimmed (the height on the right side is only 139 mm)

Provenance

…; sale, Willem Frederik Piek (1838-1916, Oudshoorn), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 1 June 1897 sqq., no. 206, as Jacob van Ruisdael, fl. 31, to the museum (L. 2228)

Object number: RP-T-1897-A-3485

Entry

The general location – Velsen (or Velzen), a village some seven kilometres north of Haarlem in the province of Noord-Holland – is known thanks to the inscription by the artist at upper centre. However, the site can be even more precisely identified as Driehuis (located one kilometre further north and part of the municipality of Velsen), on the basis of the tower of the church of Sint Engelmundus rising above the skyline. In the foreground is a ghostly figure with a staff walking in the dunes.

The sheet’s traditional attribution to Jacob van Ruisdael (1626-1682) – accepted by Rosenberg in 1928 – was correctly rejected by Simon (1930) and every scholar since then. Giltaij noted that the drawing’s style and composition were closely related to several landscape drawings formerly ascribed to Ruisdael, which he assigned to his ‘Problem Group 3’.¹ This group includes two topographical drawings in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, both of which are similarly inscribed with the location at upper centre: one sheet is a View of Beverwijk (inv. no. 1789),² the other a View of St Maarten (inv. no. 11445).³ To this group Slive added a View of a Town (Weesp?) in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (inv. no. Mas.1948).⁴ One might also tentatively include with this group the Rijksmuseum’s Landscape with a Castle near the Bank of a River (inv. no. RP-T-1954-98), also once ascribed to Ruisdael: it shares roughly the same format and has traces of an inscription identifying the location at upper centre.

There is no consensus over the identity of the draughtsman. The drawings cannot be executed by Jacob Esselens (1626-1687), to whom the two drawings in Munich were once attributed. Following a suggestion by Schatborn, Vignau-Wilberg proposed as the author of the Munich views the name of Guillam Du Bois (1623-1680), to whom a drawing in a private collection in Germany was classified.⁵ While there is a stylistic coherence within this group of landscape sketches, they have little in common with the lacy style of the ex-Ruisdael drawings that Giltaij assigned to Du Bois.⁶ It took Giltaij nearly thirty years to identify the author of his ‘Problem Group 1’.⁷ It can only be hoped that the correct identity of the artists of ‘Problem Group 2’ and ‘Problem Group 3’ will one day come to light. Slive mooted the attractive, but so far unprovable theory that the author of ‘Problem Group 3’ might be Jacob’s father, Isaack van Ruisdael (1599-1677).⁸

Ingrid Oud, 2000/Jane Shoaf Turner, 2019

Literature

J. Rosenberg, Jacob van Ruisdael, Berlin 1928, no. 1 (as Jacob van Ruisdael); K.E. Simon, Jacob van Ruisdael: Eine Darstellung seiner Entwicklung, Berlin 1930, p. 85 (not authentic); K.E. Simon, ‘Jacob Isaacksz van Ruisdael’, in U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXIX (1935), p. 192 (not Jacob van Ruisdael and totally insignificant); Hollandsche teekenkunst in de Gouden Eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1935, no. 128 (under ‘Velp’); J. Bolten, Dutch Drawings from the Collection of Dr C. Hofstede de Groot, Utrecht 1967, p. 116, under no. 90 (as Jacob van Ruisdael); J. Giltaij, ‘De tekeningen van Jacob van Ruisdael’, Oud Holland 94 (1980), nos. 2/3, p. 178 (n. 90; unknown artist); T. Vignau-Wilberg, Das Land am Meer: Holländische Landschaft im 17. Jahrhundert, exh. cat. Munich (Staatliche Graphische Sammlung)/Bonn (Rheinisches Landesmuseum) 1993, p. 140, under no. 50 (fig. 43; not Jacob van Ruisdael, Dutch, c. 1650, Guillam Du Bois?); S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, New Haven 2001, no. dubD2

Citation

I. Oud, 2000/J. Shoaf Turner, 2019, 'anonymous, Landscape with the Church of Sint Engelmundus, Driehuis, near Velsen, c. 1650 - c. 1675', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.59793

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