Object data
red chalk, some areas deliberately rubbed with a finger or wet brush, with white chalk
height 226 mm × width 176 mm
Rembrandt van Rijn
Leiden, c. 1628 - c. 1629
red chalk, some areas deliberately rubbed with a finger or wet brush, with white chalk
height 226 mm × width 176 mm
stamped: upper left (effaced), with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)
inscribed on former mount (now removed): in blue pencil, 6
Watermark: None
Light foxing throughout;1 discolouration on verso, where drawing was mounted with smaller window opening and exposed to light
...; collection Remigius Adrianus Haanen [van Haanen] (1812-94), Vienna;2 ? his student Hermine Lang-Laris (1842-1913), Munich; from whom purchased, with nine other drawings, by Dr Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930), The Hague, 1900;3 by whom donated to the museum, 1906, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum (L. 2228), 1930
Object number: RP-T-1930-54(R)
Credit line: Gift of C. Hofstede de Groot, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Leiden 1606 - Amsterdam 1669)
After attending Latin school in his native Leiden, Rembrandt, the son of a miller, enrolled at Leiden University in 1620, but soon abandoned his studies to become an artist. He first trained (1621-23) under the Leiden painter Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburg (c. 1571-1638), followed by six months with the Amsterdam history painter Pieter Lastman (c. 1583-1633). Returning to Leiden around 1624, he shared a studio with Jan Lievens, where he aimed to establish himself as a history painter, winning the admiration of the poet and courtier Constantijn Huygens. In 1628 Gerard Dou (1613-75) became his first pupil. In the autumn of 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where his career rapidly took off. Three years later he joined the Guild of St Luke and married Saskia Uylenburgh (1612-42), niece of the art dealer Hendrik Uylenburgh (c. 1587-1661), in whose house he had been living and working. She died shortly after giving birth to their son Titus, by which time Rembrandt was already in financial straits owing to excessive spending on paintings, prints, antiquities and studio props for his history pieces. After Saskia’s death, Rembrandt lived first with Titus's wet nurse, Geertje Dircx (who eventually sued Rembrandt for breach of promise and was later imprisoned for her increasingly unstable behaviour), and then with his later housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels (by whom he had a daughter, Cornelia).
Mounting debts made him unable to meet the payments of his house on the Jodenbreestraat and forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656 and to sell his house and art collection. In the last decade of his life, he, Hendrickje and Titus resided in more modest accommodation on the Rozengracht, but Rembrandt continued to be dogged by continuing financial difficulties. His beloved Titus died in 1668. Rembrandt survived him by only a year and was buried in the Westerkerk.
There are very few drawings by Rembrandt that can be connected with his paintings. This sheet is an exception (as are inv. nos. RP-T-1947-213 and RP-T-1896-A-3172). The sketch on what is now considered its verso (fig. a, inv. no. RP-T-1930-54(V))4 – a study for three scribes under a curtain – played an important role in the evolution of Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver, dated 1629, now in an English private collection.5 Two further sheets of studies survive for this, Rembrandt’s most important Leiden-period painting: a compositional study of figures surrounding a priest in pen and wash, formerly in the Albertina in Vienna, and now in a private collection,6 which has a recently revealed study of a standing figure and a kneeling figure on its verso,7 and a black chalk study of Two Scribes on the verso of a double-sided sheet in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (inv. no. R 89 verso (PK)).8 The newly discovered faint sketch on the verso of the compositional study is apparently related to the kneeling figure of Judas and the standing high priest. Since Rembrandt probably started working on the painting in 1628, all four known studies for it can be dated to that year or to the beginning of 1629. Another drawing of the subject is mentioned in the catalogue of the Lawrence collection and subsequently in the auction catalogue of the Esdaile collection,9 from which it was purchased by Andrew Geddes: ‘Judas laying the thirty pieces of silver before the high priest, who is seated under a canopy to the right, the members of the council around him... a very grand design; from the collection of Zoomer of Amsterdam’. However, since Rembrandt never made ‘grand designs’, this was probably no more than a copy of the painting.
There was no firm iconographic tradition for the representation of Judas Repentant,10 and Rembrandt, in his search for an appropriate narrative, used both the canvas and the various drawings to explore different solutions as the painting evolved toward the final composition, which strongly emphasized Judas’s acute feelings of repentance.11 The work had a complex gestation, as can be deduced from X-radiographs that show a number of important changes made during the course of its execution.12 Rembrandt had apparently initially envisaged the high priest seated on an elevated throne, below a heavy curtain, in the upper left-hand area of the painting, where X-radiographs show an open space below the curtain; Rembrandt then decided to move the high priest more towards the centre of the composition and to have him standing, but, as our drawing shows, he initially wanted to retain the curtain. The sketch of Two Scribes in Rotterdam probably immediately follows the Amsterdam drawing and seems to reflect the artist’s decision to separate the seated scribes from the standing priest (who was obliterated with opaque white on the Amsterdam verso, though over time he has become visible again due to abrasion). The compositional drawing in the private collection – probably made after the painting was well underway – seems to be a subsequent version of the whole composition in which the curtain is completely left out. Two of the scribes in our drawing are now seated in the background and the standing figure has been moved to the right. As a result, very little of the composition of our drawing survives in the painting, in which most of the light falls on the open book at the left, and the seated figure at the lower centre of our sheet turns towards Judas, a movement that connects the previous action of reading the book with the new action involving Judas.
In drawing the verso, Rembrandt started with pen and brown ink and then added wash in the same yellow-brown ink – a special compound, as can be clearly seen from the grains of pigment in the lightly brushed areas.13 Opaque white was used not only to cover the whole of the standing figure, but also to lighten the chair and to adjust the profile of the foreground figure. The very sketchy lines sometimes end in a dot, a feature we often see in Rembrandt’s work. The wash is characteristically transparent so that the paper shines through and the brushstrokes always remain visible. In this respect, the sheet is similar to the only known landscape drawing from the Leiden period, a view of a town gate, in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (inv. no. 2138).14 Rembrandt also skilfully conveyed differences in tone, which is evident in both the pen lines and the brushstrokes.
In the middle of what is now considered the recto is the depiction of a pair of half-draped legs, presumed to be those of a woman; one leg is covered, the other is bare. It was made in red chalk and the exposed knee heightened with white; then the right foot was given an even tone over the red chalk. In several places the red chalk was moistened with the tongue, which, unlike using a brush with wash, preserves the structure of the chalk. Darkening areas to give them depth was called ‘deepening’, and Rembrandt used this method behind the knee and under the drapery. The combination of the dark areas with detailed treatment of the exposed leg and the sketchy style of the rest of the drawing result in making the leg stand out strongly. In order to improve its representation and to define the context of the lower half of the figure’s body and to distinguish it from the undrawn torso and more drapery, Rembrandt drew a vertical loop above the figure’s right knee and two curved horizontal lines above both legs, guidelines that do not seem to portray anything in particular but improve the composition as a whole. In addition, there is a short horizontal line through the figure’s proper right foot, probably the edge of a low platform on which the heel of the other foot is resting.
The motif of a platform on which models in the studio are placed occurs in a number of Rembrandt’s paintings, including two with which the recto study has been related, the Judas Returning the Thirty Pieces of Silver and a work of the previous year, the Samson and Delilah, dated 1628, in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin (inv. no. 812A).15 The drawing of legs has generally been seen as a preparatory study for the figure of Delilah in the Berlin painting,16 but I would now term it ‘indirectly preparatory’. Rembrandt often drew motifs or part of motifs as exercises, perhaps with a painting in mind, but not always with an immediate purpose. In the case of the study of legs, it seems to me that he conceived of the legs as an exercise for a female figure rather than for a man. In a recent monographic exhibition devoted to the genesis of the Judas painting,17 Per Rumberg, on the other hand, argued (less plausibly in my opinion) that the legs in the study are those of a man and that the pose, with legs slightly apart, is more closely related to that of the high priest in the Judas painting than to the pose of Delilah, who kneels on one leg in the Berlin painting. He further connected the two parallel looped chalk strokes above the legs with the belt worn by the high priest in the Judas painting. By contrast, Martin Royalton-Kisch18 was tempted to date the study of legs somewhat later, too late to have functioned in the preparation of either painting, for he saw the handling as comparable to some drawings that Rembrandt made in red chalk as late as circa 1635-37.19
Peter Schatborn, 2017
C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1300 (c. 1630); W.R. Valentiner, Rembrandt: Die Meisters Handzeichnungen, 2 vols., Stuttgart and elsewhere 1925-34, II (1934), no. 460 (c. 1629); M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1942, nos. 5-6 (c. 1629); O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 9; 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. 5, with earlier literature; J. Giltaij, The Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, coll. cat. Rotterdam 1988, pp. 38-39, under no. 2, fig. e (verso); D. Bomford et al., Rembrandt, exh. cat. London (National Gallery) 1988-89 (Exh. ser. Art in the Making), p. 57, fig. 26 (verso); M. Royalton-Kisch, ‘Rembrandt’s Sketches for his Paintings’, Master Drawings 27 (1989), no. 2, p. 131 from pp. 128-45, fig. 8 (verso); C.P. Schneider et al., Rembrandt’s Landscapes: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1990, p. 144, under no. 31, fig. 2; C. Vogelaar et al., Rembrandt and Lievens in Leiden: ‘A pair of young and noble painters’, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum de Lakenhal) 1991-92, p. 106, fig. 58 (recto), and p. 123, fig. 73 (verso); M. Royalton-Kisch, Drawings by Rembrandt and his Circle in the British Museum, exh. cat. London 1992, under nos. 2-4 and 15, n. 11, p. 220, pl. 1; P. Schatborn, ‘Rembrandt: From Life and from Memory’, in G. Cavalli-Björkman (ed.), Rembrandt and his Pupils: Papers Given at a Symposium in Nationalmuseum Stockholm 2-3 October 1992, Stockholm 1993, p. 160 from pp. 156-72; E. van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, Amsterdam 2009 (orig. edn. 1997), p. 25, fig. 25 (verso); A. Chong (ed.), Rembrandt Creates Rembrandt: Art and Ambition in Leiden, 1629-1631, exh. cat. Boston (Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum) 2000-01, p. 61, fig. 58 (verso); J. Lloyd Williams et al., Rembrandt’s Women, exh. cat. Edinburgh (National Gallery of Scotland)/London (Royal Academy of Arts) 2001, no. 9 (recto); E. van de Wetering et al., The Mystery of the Young Rembrandt, exh. cat. Kassel (Staatliche Museen)/Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2001-02, no. 34; R. van Straten, Rembrandts Leidse tijd, 1606-1632, Leiden 2005, p. 96, fig. 117 (recto), and p. 111, fig. 138 (verso); E. van der Wetering et al., Rembrandt: Quest of a Genius, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis)/Berlin (Gemäldegalerie) 2006, p. 68, fig. 5 (recto); E.J. Sluijter, Rembrandt and the Female Nude, Amsterdam 2006, p. 319, fig. 303 (recto); R.H. Fuchs, Rembrandt spreekt: Een verslag, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 111-12, fig. 17 (verso); D. Bomford et al., Art in the Making: Rembrandt, London 2006 (orig. edn. London 1988-89), p. 38, under no. 1, fig. 27 (verso); E. van de Wetering, Rembrandt: The Painter at Work, Amsterdam 2009 (orig. edn. 1997), p. 25, fig. 25 (verso); M. Royalton-Kisch and P. Schatborn, ‘The Core Group of Rembrandt Drawings, II: The List’, Master Drawings 49 (2011), no. 3, pp. 323-46, no. 5; J. Noorman and D. de Witt (eds.), Rembrandt’s Naked Truth: Drawing Nude Models in the Golden Age, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2016, p. 19, fig. 7 (recto); P. Rumberg, with H. Bevers, Rembrandt’s First Masterpiece, exh. cat. New York (The Morgan Library & Museum) 2016, no. 3, repr.; M. Royalton-Kisch, The Drawings of Rembrandt: A Revision of Otto Benesch’s Catalogue Raisonné (online), no. 0009, with further literature
P. Schatborn, 2017, 'Rembrandt van Rijn, Study of a Woman’s Legs / verso: Three Scribes, Leiden, c. 1628 - c. 1629', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.28123
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