Merry Couple

Entry

A laughing man looks directly out at the spectator, while the woman who embraces him looks to her right. The man holds a jug in his hand, and he has opened the lid slightly with his thumb. A bag hangs by his side. He raises his right leg, although in an earlier rendering, which was cancelled with hatching, his leg was resting on the ground. An unrecognizable object, possibly a broom, is lying in the foreground.

The pen lines are rather coarse and messy, and the style does not convincingly reflect an original by Rembrandt: the crosshatching on the man’s upper left leg would be especially unusual for him. Moreover, the traces of black chalk under the pen sketch indicate that this is a copy, presumably made by a Rembrandt pupil or follower after one or more untraced originals by him or another school member. In the past, the present drawing has been attributed to Rembrandt’s pupils Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680) and Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-1674) (see Provenance).

Similar types appear in Rembrandt’s etchings, for instance, the laughing boy in the Pancake Woman of 1635 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1961-1056).³ Both the subject and the style of the sketch closely resemble a Rembrandt drawing with three sketches of soldiers and women making love, on the verso of a double-sided sheet in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 2312).⁴ There the man sports a feathered cap, as in the museum’s drawing, but he also wears a sword. This is the way in which the Prodigal Son was usually depicted when accompanied by women of easy virtue. The Amsterdam sketch also has symbolic erotic significance, which can be seen in the open lid of the jug.⁵ The Berlin drawing is generally dated to the mid-1630s, as are the etching of the Pancake Woman and the museum’s sketch. Although an attribution of the original prototype to Van den Eeckhout cannot completely be excluded, there are insufficient similarities to his drawings to support this claim. This is also true for Bol.

Peter Schatborn, 2018