All works in Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum

anonymous, after Philips Wouwerman

Mounted Trumpeter and Another Man about to Mount his Horse, with an Alternative Study for his Head and Shoulders

after 1655

Object data

counterproof in red chalk; framing line in brown ink

height 160 mm × width 205 mm

Inscriptions

  • inscribed on verso: lower left, in pencil, fr. ra

  • stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

watermark: countermark with letters IV

Condition

Thin areas and repairs along upper edge and lower centre; light foxing throughout

Provenance

…; sale, H.J. Holgen et al. [unknown section.], Amsterdam (P. Brandt), 7 May 1951 sqq., no. 579, fl. 12.50, to the museum (L. 2228)

Object number: RP-T-1951-210

Copyright: Public domain

The artist

Entry

This counterproof includes motifs, in reverse, from a painting by Wouwerman of circa 1655, A Trumpeter in front of a Sutler’s Tent, in the Gema¨ldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden (inv. no. 1433).17 The original drawing from which the counterproof was pulled would have been in the same sense as the painting. Interestingly, the head and shoulders of the man about to mount his steed (left relatively unresolved above the horse’s saddle) were redrawn in greater detail at far left. Like the many red chalk studies of individual figures and figural motifs that are directly related to paintings by Wouwerman or reproductive prints after them – drawings long thought to be authentic works by the artist – the original from which this was pulled is generally assumed to be a copy of the painting rather than a preparatory study for it. That autograph studies like this by the artist must once have existed, however, is suggested by the frequent repetition of the same motifs in more than one documented painting by Wouwerman.

Some red chalk copies are in the same sense as their related paintings, some are in reverse, and some survive now only as counterproofs (as is the case here). This points to a possible role of the copies in the production of reproductive prints. As Wuestman noted, ‘the work of this Haarlem horse painter was among the most frequently reproduced of all seventeenth-century Dutch artists.... (Many) tens of thousands of impressions must have circulated, and given the lively international trade in prints, they would doubtless have become known in other countries when still hot off the press.’18 It is estimated that almost 300 prints after his paintings were produced between the late 1650s or early 1660s and 1800, enough to have caused the Swiss portrait painter Johann Caspar Fu¨ssli (1706-1782) to have complained bitterly in 1756 that Germany was positively buried under an avalanche of prints after Wouwerman.19 Most of these were made in the Netherlands, but from the 1730s, production took off in France, beginning with Jean Moyreau (1690-1762).20 Indeed, it is worth noting that a reproductive print exists for almost all the painted compositions for which there is a related red chalk copy, some in reverse, some in the same sense.21 Moreover, the medium favoured for drawn copies by reproductive printmakers, especially in France, was often red chalk.

Jane Shoaf Turner, 2019

Literature

A. Stefes, ‘Did Philips Wouwerman Draw with Red Chalk?’, Master Drawings 57 (2019), no. 4, pp. 463 (citing the present writer’s proposed connection with the Dresden painting) and 467 (fig. 31)

Citation

J. Shoaf Turner, 2019, 'anonymous, Mounted Trumpeter and Another Man about to Mount his Horse, with an Alternative Study for his Head and Shoulders, after 1655', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.63959

(accessed 21 September 2024 19:46:19).

Footnotes