Seated Boy, Drawing

Entry

A boy is bent over a table, his gaze focused on his work, apparently a drawing. On the table in front of him are sheets of paper and a portfolio leaning against the wall in an otherwise empty room. Next to the sheet of paper on which he is working is a porte-crayon and pieces of chalk or graphite. The scene is starkly lit by a candle on the table and by a lantern on the floor at lower left. Unlike the boy in a mezzotint (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1906-3196) by Jacob Gole (1665-1724) after Godefridus Schalcken (1643-1706), the artist to whom the present sheet was once attributed, this young artist is not drawing from a sculpted model. Instead, he seems to be working from memory or sketching his own inventions. He has thus evidently reached a more advanced stage of his training than most of the young draughtsmen depicted in Dutch seventeenth-century art, as would be fitting for a youth of his presumed age, in his mid-teens.

Though generally reminiscent of paintings by Schalcken, such as Young Draughtsman at a Table (c. 1675-80) in the Noordbrabants Museum, ’s-Hertogenbosch (on loan from the Cultural Heritage Agency of the Netherlands, inv. no. NK 2935),⁴ with its sophisticated light effect with two different sources, the sheet lacks stylistic parallels with authentic drawings by the artist. This was also the conclusion reached by Schalcken specialist Beherman, who rightly rejected the traditional attribution.⁵

The subject-matter of a young man working at a table coincides with the themes of certain drawings by Constantijn Verhout, such as the museum’s inv. no. RP-T-1937-70, in which a figure is similarly focussed intensely on his task (recording calculations in an account book). There, too, we find comparable softly blended hatching, thin contour lines, enhanced by short, markedly accentuated strokes, especially in the rendering of the profile faces, highlighted chin, the strands of hair, or the transition of nostril and cheek. These characteristics are also found in inv. nos. RP-T-1967-92 and RP-T-1895-A-496, both now assigned to Verhout

Also related in theme – though perhaps illustrating its polar opposite, a lazy young student – is the Verhout’s Sleeping Student, a signed and dated painting (1663) by the artist in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (inv no. NM 677).⁶

None of the other drawings attributed to Verhout in the Rijksmuseum and elsewhere is enhanced with wash. This should not, however, argue against the plausibility of the underlying attribution. It could well be that the heavy passages of wash were added later, concealing shadows already indicated by chalk hatching. The reworking may have been intended to heighten the drama of the scene’s nocturnal light effects, but some details of the perspective and space are confused, for instance, the transition between wall and floor to the right of the desk, which is not continued to the left, and the dark shadow cast by the desk, which is missing behind the stool legs and the boy’s right shin.

Annemarie Stefes, 2018