Study of a Man Playing Knucklebones

Entry

In the present sheet, a man – apparently a soldier, judging by what seems to be his armoured cuirass – is playing knucklebones or jacks (‘koten’). In that game of ancient origin, knuckels (astralagi) from the ankle of pigs, sheep or cows were either thrown into a ring in the attempt to kick out those of the other players or thrown and caught with the back of the hand in a series of prescribed throws. It is not fully clear which version of the game the figure here is playing. His gaze, shaded from the sun by a wide-brimmed hat, is focused on a stone plinth obviously used as playing field. In the left hand, he is apparently holding a knuckle ready to be thrown, while the item in his right hand appears to be the bowl of his white clay pipe. In an alternative detail, rendered with thin chalk lines, his left arm is stretched out as in a throw. That gesture was discarded, with the final solution marked by more decisive chalk strokes and accented with white chalk.

Spirited and vigorously done, the drawing must have been done from life, as is also betrayed by pentimenti in the position of the right foot. A similar figure, likewise wearing a cuirass, appears in Weenix’s Italian Harbour Scene (1649) in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht (inv. no. NK 2728), on loan from the Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed, Rijswijk/Amersfoort.² That painting served as basis for the present drawing’s attribution, first suggested in 1973 by Peter Schatborn and recently accepted by Anke van Wagenberg-ter Hoeven.³

Weenix apparently drew his figure studies while in Italy, assembling a stock for his painted staffage.⁴ Unfortunately, little remains of this presumed repertory of figures drawings. Of the studies on blue paper mentioned as being after the same model,⁵ only those in the Minneapolis Institute of Art (inv. no. 56.1 as ‘Gerard ter Borch II’) and the Frits Lugt collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris (inv. no. 4883),⁶ seem to be by the same hand.

Annemarie Stefes, 2018