Rijksmuseum

Object data

pen and brown ink, with greyish-brown wash, over traces of black chalk, on light brown paper; framing line in brown ink

height 278 mm × width 205 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed on verso: centre, in pencil, Het Coliseum; lower centre, in a nineteenth-century hand, in pencil, u.g.; lower left corner, in a nineteenth-century hand, in brown ink, 126 / j / 6[?]; lower right, in a late nineteenth- or early twentieth-century hand, in pencil, 16; below that, in a nineteenth-century hand, in pencil, J. Asselijn., below that, in brown ink, N.°III.

Technical notes

watermark: coat of arms with a visored moor’s head above two balls within a shield, surmounted by another moor’s head

Condition

Minor losses at lower right border

Provenance

…; donated by jonkvrouwe Agnes Henriette Beels van Heemstede-van Loon (1829-1902), Amsterdam, to the museum, 1889

Object number: RP-T-1898-A-3723

Credit line: Gift of A.H. Beels van Heemstede-van Loon

Entry

Traditionally ascribed to Jan Asselijn (c. 1610-1652), this drawing was rightly excluded by Steland in her catalogue raisonné of that artist’s drawings (1989). At first glance, the dominant parallel hatching resembles late sixteenth- or early seventeenth-century drawings, for instance by Tobias Verhaecht (1561-1631), Mathijs Bril (c. 1550-1583), Gillis van Valckenborch (1599-1622) or Jacob Pynas (c. 1592/93-after 1650). Yet the handling of the pen appears freer, less systematically arranged, and the staffage is clearly more modern in character. This might point to a mid- to late-seventeenth-century artist working in an archaic mode. One such artist to whom such description is applicable is Adriaen Honich.¹ His pen drawings betray a similar penchant for nervous hatching. See, for example, the Road in Rome in the Frits Lugt collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris (inv. no. 5834),² or a double-sided drawing in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WA1946.360), formerly given to Claude Lorrain (c. 1604/05-1682).³ These drawings feature a combination of dense parallel hatching; loose, curly loops; and vibrant penstrokes in the shape of tightly-wound springs for delineating foliage tendrils, all interspersed with scratchy little dots. Even those drawings by Honich that are less dominated by graphic values show these characteristics, as can be seen in inv. no. RP-T-1991-16. Since the number of extant drawings by the artist does not correspond to the length of his stay in Rome, his oeuvre must have been considerably larger and probably also more varied than previously thought.

Annemarie Stefes, 2018

Literature

De bouwvallen in en om Rome door Nederlandsche kunstenaars afgebeeld, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1908, no. 128 (as Jan Asselijn)

Citation

A. Stefes, 2019, 'attributed to Adriaen Honich, View in the Colosseum, Rome, Rome, c. 1667 - c. 1680', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200116957

(accessed 17 December 2025 04:44:03).