Study of the Head of a Boy, Facing Left

c. 1654 - c. 1658

Object data

black chalk; framing line in brown ink

height 122 mm × width 123 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed on verso: lower left, in brown ink, 443; next to this, in a nineteenth-century hand, in pencil (with the Klinkosch sale no.), K969; below this, in pencil, 23N; next to this, in pencil, 71182; next to this, in pencil, L; lower centre, in pencil, Visscher Cornel[is]; next to this, in pencil, PEB pa II; below this, in pencil, CLSEss (?); next to this, in pencil, 2
stamped on verso: lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228); lower right, with the mark of Pitcairn Knowles (L. 2643)

Provenance

…; ? collection Sybrand Feitama II (1694-1758), Amsterdam, 1736;¹ ? from whom, fl. 1, to Antonie Sijdervelt (1731-65), Amsterdam, 1756;² ? his sale, Amsterdam (H. de Winter), 23 April 1766 sqq., Album B, no. 45 (‘Cornelis Visscher. Het Hoofd van een Jongeling omtrent in profil te zien, met een hoed op, uitvoerig en fraai met zwart kryt’), fl. 8, to the dealer J. IJver, Amsterdam;³ …; ? anonymous sale, Amsterdam (H. Gartman et al.), 2 March 1802, Album B, no. 29 (‘Een Portret van een Jongeling, het Hooft gedekt met een ronde Hoed, schoon met zwart kryt, door of is in de manier van C. Visser’); …; sale, Ritter Josef Carl von Klinkosch (1822-88, Vienna), Vienna (C.J. Wawra), 15 April 1889 sqq., no. 969;⁴ …; collection William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2643); his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25 June 1895, no. 708, fl. 62, to the dealer C.F. Roos for the Vereniging Rembrandt;⁵ from whom on loan to the museum, 1895; from whom, fl. 71.50, to the museum (L. 2228), 1902

Object number: RP-T-1902-A-4626

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Cornelis Visscher (Haarlem 1628/29 - 1658 Amsterdam)

Little is known about his early life. Information regarding his birth is based on two surviving self-portraits, one from 1649 in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1895,0915.1343), and the other, dated 10 April 1653, in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4624). He was presumably born in Haarlem, where he became a member of the Guild of St Luke in 1653. His father – who cannot be identified – must have been an artist as well, because in the admission book of the guild Visscher is described as ‘plaetsnijder en Meester outste zoon’ (‘engraver and the master’s oldest son’). Two younger brothers, Jan Visscher (1633/34-1712) and Lambert Visscher (1630/32-after 1690), also pursued artistic careers. The relationship between Cornelis and the relatively unknown painter Cornelis de Visscher (c. 1530-c. 1586) of Gouda is unclear. According to Van Mander, the latter was a skilled portraitist, but had some mental issues and died in a shipwreck on the North Sea.⁶ Perhaps the same person can be identified with Cornelis de Visscher, whose money was managed (presumably on behalf of his under-age children) by the orphans’ board of Gouda because he was considered mentally ill; in 1622, the widow of Cornelis’ brother, the painter Gerrit Gerritsz. de Visscher II (c. 1559-before 1622), collected the money from the orphans’ board on behalf of Cornelis’ two nephews, her sons Gerrit de Visscher III (?-?), a goldsmith living in Gouda, and Barent de Visscher (?-?).⁷

Cornelis Visscher probably received his first artistic training from his father. Later he must have been apprenticed to the Haarlem painter, engraver and draughtsman Pieter Soutman (1593/1601-1657), with whom he collaborated on several print series in 1649/50. Shortly after his admission in the Guild of St Luke in Haarlem, he moved to Amsterdam. In the 1650s, he received numerous commissions for portrait drawings and engravings of Haarlem and Amsterdam scholars, clergymen and writers, including Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679) (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-H-P-41). One of his last commissions was an engraved portrait of Constantijn Huygens I (1596-1687) after a lost drawing by the sitter’s son Christiaan Huygens (1629-95), which was included as the frontispiece to Huygens’ poem book Koren-bloemen (1658) (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-27.428). It was finished in the last months of 1657, when the artist was presumably suffering from ‘de steen’ (kidney stones). Visscher died the following year and was buried on 16 January in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam. Despite his short life – he was only twenty-eight years old when he died – Visscher left an extensive oeuvre, consisting of more than 100 drawings and some 185 prints.

Marleen Ram, 2019

References
R. van Eijnden and A. van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst, 4 vols., Haarlem 1816-40, I (1816), pp. 71-77, IV (1840), pp. 96-97; P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, pp. 100-01; R.E.O. Ekkart, ‘Visscher, Cornelis (de)’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., London/New York 1996, XXXII, pp. 622-23; J. Hawley, ‘An Introduction to the Life and Drawings of Jan de Vissccher’, Master Drawings 52 (2014), no. 1, pp. 59-94; J. Hawley, ‘Cornelis Visscher and Constantijn Huygens’s Koren-bloemen’, Print Quarterly 32 (2015), no. 1, pp. 51-53

Entry

According to Broos, this drawing can be identified with ‘een Moorenkopje’ (‘Head of an African Boy’) by Visscher in the famous collection of Sybrand Feitama II (1694-1758) in Amsterdam.⁸ The latter had bought the drawing in 1736, the same year in which a large group of drawings by Visscher appeared on the market.⁹ Twenty years later, Feitama sold it to his friend Antonie Sijdervelt (1731-1765).¹⁰ At Sijdervelt’s sale in 1766, the sheet was simply described as ‘Hoofd van een Jongeling omtrent in profil te zien, met een hoed op’ (‘Head of a Boy in Profile, with a Hat’).¹¹

The drawing is close in subject-matter and style to Visscher’s Study of the Head of a Boy, Facing Right in the Goethe-Nationalmuseum, Weimar (inv. no. 905). That drawing is presumably a preparatory study in reverse for the head of the assistant of the rat catcher in Visscher’s famous print of 1655 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-62.102).¹²

Bonny van Sighem, 2000/Marleen Ram, 2019

Literature

K.G. Boon and L.C.J. Frerichs, Hollandse tekeningen uit de Gouden Eeuw. Keuze uit openbare en particuliere Nederlandse verzamelingen, exh. cat. Brussels (Koninklijke Bibliotheek Albert I)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Hamburg (Hamburger Kunsthalle) 1961, no. 136; I.Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘Cornelis Visscher (1629-1662), kop van een jongen onder een hoed met brede rand. Caspar Netscher (1639-1684), een jong meisje met een tol’, Openbaar Kunstbezit 6 (1962), p. 1a; B.P.J. Broos, ‘“Notitie der Teekeningen van Sybrand Feitama”, II. “Verkocht, verhandeld, verëerd, geruild en overgedaan”’, Oud Holland 99 (1985), no. 2, pp. 123, 144 (fig. 37), 150; B.P.J. Broos and M. Schapelhouman, Nederlandse tekenaars geboren tussen 1600 en 1660, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1993 (Oude tekeningen in het bezit van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, waaronder de collectie Fodor, vol. 4), p. 211, under no. 166

Citation

B. van Sighem, 2000/M. Ram, 2019, 'Cornelis (II) Visscher, Study of the Head of a Boy, Facing Left, c. 1654 - c. 1658', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.63620

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