Rijksmuseum

Object data

black chalk; framing line in black ink

height 142 mm × width 190 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed: upper centre, possibly by the artist, in black chalk or graphite (barely legible), T Huys H [...]
inscribed on verso: lower left, in black ink (with the inv. no. of Welcker), Inv. No 100; lower right, in pencil, Ruysdael
stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of Welcker (L. 2793c); lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

Watermark: Lower part of a mark (a foolscap?) with three balls, above the letters, AD

Condition

Light foxing throughout, with a small area of discoloration of the paper in the upper left corner

Provenance

…; collection Dr Albert Welcker (1884-1957), Amsterdam (L. 2793c); …; sale, Dr Hendrik Catharinus Valkema Blouw (1883-1953, Bodegraven), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 2 March 1954 sqq., no. 403 (as Jacob van Ruisdael), fl. 60, to the museum (L. 2228), 1954

Object number: RP-T-1954-98

Entry

Ever since the Valkema Blouw sale of 1954, the castle represented in this drawing – seen in the distance through a row of trees – has been identified as Bentheim Castle, located in the Saxon spa town just over the German border, some 20 km northeast of Enschede. Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-1682), to whom the sheet was traditionally attributed, probably visited Bentheim in 1650 or 1651, the date of the earliest of some dozen paintings of the site by the artist.¹

Curiously, however, there are no known drawings of this subject that can be securely given to Ruisdael. Of four possible examples catalogued by Büttner and Unverfehrt,² they were certain of the attribution to Ruisdael of only one: a view of the castle from the south-east, formerly in the collection of George and Maida Abrams, Boston, and now in a Dutch private collection, Wassenaar. However, that drawing has since been reattributed to Ruisdael’s probable pupil Jan van Kessel (1641-1680), as was proposed in 2008 by Jeroen Giltaij in an e-mail to Quentin Buvelot.³ Two of the other three sheets are in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden (inv. nos. C 1979-108 and C 1134),⁴ and the fourth is in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 2855).⁵ Slive listed all four sheets under his ‘dubious and wrongly attributed drawing’ section in his 2001 monograph on the artist.

In fact, neither the traditional attribution, nor the identification of the location can be sustained. The large, square eleventh-century keep – the Powder Tower (Pulverturm) – that dominates the skyline of the Bentheim building complex is missing, and the remains of the possibly original inscription, T Huys H[…], point to a different castle.⁶

The sheet might derive from a now lost or unknown sketchbook that has been dismantled,⁷ but the artist remains to be identified. It may be by the same artist (also formerly identified as Ruisdael) that was responsible for the museum’s Landscape with the Church of Sint Engelmundus, Driehuis, near Velsen (inv. no. RP-T-1897-A-3485), as well as other topographical views of the same format, inscribed with the location at upper centre.

Ingrid Oud, 2000/Lukas Nonner, 2019

Literature

Q. Buvelot, Jacob van Ruisdael schildert Bentheim, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2009, pp. 36-37 (fig. 28; as formerly attributed to Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with Castle Bentheim)

Citation

I. Oud, 2000/L. Nonner, 2019, 'anonymous, Landscape with a Castle near the Bank of a River, c. 1650 - c. 1675', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.59797

(accessed 23 September 2024 14:21:35).