Study of a Skull, Facing Right

c. 1654 - c. 1658

Object data

black chalk; framing lines in brown and black ink

height 95 mm × width 113 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed: lower left, in an eighteenth- or nineteenth-century hand, in pencil, C. Visscher
inscribed on verso, in pencil: lower left, 29; next to that, f 7.e.2 c.e; lower right, S/
stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of De Vos Jbzn (L. 1450); next to that, with the mark of Pitcairn Knowles (L. 2643); lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Provenance

…; sale, Samuel van Huls (1655-1734, The Hague), The Hague (J. Swart), 14 May 1736 sqq., Album KK, no. 2055 (‘4 têtes de mort sur une feuille’); … ; sale, Jan Hendrik Troost van Groenendoelen (c. 1722-97, Amsterdam) and Jacobus Versteegen (1735-95, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 27 June 1796, Album B, no. 47 (‘Vier stuks verschillende afbeeldingen van doodshoofden; fraai en uitvoerig met zwart kryt geteekent, door C. de Visscher.’), with three other drawings; …; collection Jacob de Vos (1735-1833), Amsterdam;¹ his sale, Amsterdam (J. de Vries et al.), 30 October 1833 sqq., Album XX, no. 1 (‘Twee stuks met Doodshoofden. Breed met zwart krijt, door C. Visscher’), with inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4628, fl. 7 for both, to the dealer J. de Vries, Amsterdam;² …; collection Jacob de Vos Jbzn (1803-82), Amsterdam (L. 1450); his sale, Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 22 May 1883 sqq., no. 595, with inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4628, fl. 15 for both, to William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2643);³ his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25 June 1895 sqq., no. 710, with inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4628, fl. 15 for both, to the dealer C.F. Roos for the Vereniging Rembrandt;⁴ from whom on loan to the museum, 1895; from whom, with inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4628, fl. 17.25 for both, to the museum (L. 2228), 1902

Object number: RP-T-1902-A-4629

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.⁵ 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 (?-?).⁶

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

The present drawing and the Study of a Skull, Facing Left (inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4628) once belonged to a single sheet with four drawings of skulls by Cornelis Visscher.⁷ It was described as such at the 1736 sale of Samuel van Huls (1655-1734), one of the earliest documented collectors of drawings in the Netherlands.⁸ By 1796, at the sale of Jan Hendrik Troost van Groenendoelen (c. 1722-1794) and Jacobus Versteegen (1735-1795), the sheet must have been divided into four individual drawings.⁹ Subsequently, two of the drawings were acquired by the Rijksmuseum in 1902, while a third drawing of a skull ended up in a private collection in the Netherlands.¹⁰ The whereabouts of the fourth sheet are unknown.

According to Hawley and Ram, who reconstructed the original appearance of the dismembered sheet, the right side of the Study of a Skull, Facing Left (inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4628) connects seamlessly to the left side of the drawing in a private collection.¹¹ In both cases, the shadow of the skull, carefully rendered with parallel hatching, continues on the other sheet. Moreover, the chain lines, which measure approximately 29 mm apart, align exactly once the two sheets are connected. The present sheet was probably positioned a couple of centimetres below the Study of a Skull, Facing Left (inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4628), as both sheets measure 113 mm wide.¹² In all likelihood, the original sheet was first trimmed down the middle in order to create two sheets of stacked skulls, one consisting of the two Rijksmuseum drawings and the other of the drawing in a private collection and the now-lost fourth sheet.

From time to time, skulls crop up in Visscher’s oeuvre, for example, in his Self-portrait with a Skull of 1653 (inv. no. RP-T-1902-A-4624). However, they do not correspond directly to the black chalk studies discussed here. This can also be said for a couple of chalk studies of individual motifs on paper, including the museum’s Hands of a Rommelpot Player (inv. no. RP-T-1895-A-3076) and the Head of a Child in the Amsterdam Museum (inv. no. TA 10361).¹³ As far as can be determined, these drawings can probably be regarded as drawing exercises or general source material.¹⁴

Marleen Ram, 2019

Literature

P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, p. 16; J. Hawley and M. Ram, ‘Reconstructing a Cut-up Sheet by Cornelis Visscher’, Master Drawings 56 (2018), no. 2, p. 185 (fig. 5)

Citation

M. Ram, 2000, 'Cornelis (II) Visscher, Study of a Skull, Facing Right, 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.63622

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