Rijksmuseum

Object data

pen and brown ink, with brown wash, on paper toned with light brown wash; framing line in brown ink

height 94 mm × width 177 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed: upper right, possibly by the seventeenth-century hand associated with Funerius, illegibly in brown ink (L. 2942, 2943 and 2944); lower right, with the mark of Esdaile, in brown ink, WE (L. 2617)
inscribed on verso: centre, in pencil, 16; next to this, in pencil (with the 1906 Hofstede de Groot no.), deGr 1207; lower left and lower centre, by Esdaile, in brown ink, Formally in the colln. of JM Gouan. / 1815 WE P 84 N 146 and Rembrandt; lower centre, in pencil (with the 1895 Pitcairn Knowles sale no.), 528
stamped on verso: lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228); lower left (with the sheet oriented upside down), with the mark of MacGowan (L. 1496); below this, with the mark of Pitcairn Knowles (L. 2643)

Technical notes

Watermark: None

Provenance

...; ? Dr Johannes Claesz Furnerius (1582-1668), Rotterdam (L. 2942-4); ...; collection John MacGowan (? - 1803), Edinburgh (L. 1496); his sale, London (T. Philipe), 26 (31) January 1804 sqq., no. 547, as Rembrandt (‘A landscape, with a Dutch barn, free pen, bistre, and Indian ink, very fine’); ...; collection William Esdaile (1785-1837), London (L. 2617), 1815;¹ ? his sale, London (Christie’s), 18 June 1840 sqq., no. 1037, as Rembrandt (‘A river-scene, bistre; and a hay-stack’), £ 0.12.0, to the dealer Walter Benjamin Tiffin (1795-1877), London;² ...; collection William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2643); his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25 (26) June 1895 sqq., no. 528, fl. 100, to the dealer C.F. Roos for the Vereniging Rembrandt;³ from whom on loan to the museum, 1895; from whom, fl. 115, to the museum (L. 2228), 1901

Object number: RP-T-1901-A-4522

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

Entry

The unusual impression made by this landscape is due to the extensive passages of wash in various shades added to the initial pen drawing.⁴ If we mentally eliminate the wash, we are left with a loosely drawn sketch that is much too weak to be accepted as by Rembrandt. Since the lighting of the scene is compromised by the heavy wash, the assessment of the attribution must be based solely on the pen lines and the forms they depict.

The most striking feature that speaks against Rembrandt’s authorship is the relationship between the various shapes, which are not always clearly differentiated. The distance between the fence and the haystack, an area of the drawing where there is no wash, is not spatially convincing. We see the same problem between the haystack and the farmhouse: the lines depicting the roof of the farmhouse as it runs behind the haystack are drawn in a hesitant, unclear manner. There seems to be a horizontal cross-bar between the stakes, above the haystack, that belongs to the building behind them. It was probably incorrectly copied from another drawing. A further strange detail is the stake on the left of the haystack, which has been drawn twice – neither version is the correct length. The shadows in the tree behind and to the right of the cart have been indicated by pen hatching; they continue down to the ground where no shape is represented so they remain a purely graphic element. This is also true of the hatching that falls outside the foliage in the tree on the right – they are simply hatching lines that convey no sense of form. The structure of the cart is also rather shaky; the wheels are very weakly drawn. In short, the curious quality of this drawing is not the result of the wash alone. However much the pen lines initially seem to be Rembrandtesque, they do not create a feeling of space or a firm sense of form.

It has been remarked that the farm is reminiscent of an etching by Rembrandt (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1962-81)⁵ and of two drawings, one attributed to Abraham Furnerius (1628-1654) in the Louvre, Paris (inv. no. RF 4705),⁶ and the other given to Jacob Koninck (1614/16-before 1666), now in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (inv. no. I, 178).⁷ There are differences as well as similarities between these studies and the museum’s Landscape with a Haystack and Cart, which probably indicates that it was made by a follower who created a variant based on several landscapes by Rembrandt. Comparable original drawings are generally dated to the second half of the 1640s.⁸

The traces of an inscription in the upper right corner may possibly be the remnants of a Greek letter written in a seventeenth-century hand that has been tentatively associated by Jane Shoaf Turner with the collection of drawings assembled by Dr Johannes Claesz Furnerius, the father of Rembrandt’s pupil Abraham Furnerius.⁹

Peter Schatborn, 2018

Literature

C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1511; M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1942, no. 75 (as Rembrandt, c. 1649-50); O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 834 (as Rembrandt, c. 1648-50); P. Schatborn, Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, IV: Tekeningen van Rembrandt, zijn onbekende leerlingen en navolgers/Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1985, no. 113, with earlier literature; H. Bevers, with a contribution by G.J. Dietz and A. Penz, Zeichnungen der Rembrandtschule im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, coll. cat. Berlin 2018, pp. 277-78, under no. 150.

Citation

P. Schatborn, 2018, 'anonymous, Landscape with a Haystack and Cart in a Farmyard, after c. 1640 - c. 1650', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.28635

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