Object data
reed pen and brown ink, some areas deliberately rubbed with a finger or wet brush, on light brown cartridge paper
height 135 mm × width 204 mm
Rembrandt van Rijn
View of the Amstelveenseweg outside Amsterdam
Amsterdam, c. 1660 - c. 1662
Inscriptions
Technical notes
Watermark: Fragment of a cross within a circle
Condition
Light foxing throughout
Provenance
...; collection Comte Antoine-François Andréossy (1761-1828), Paris and Montauban;1 ...; ? sale, Henry Wellesley (1791/94-1866, Oxford), London (Sotheby), 25 (28) June 1866 sqq., possibly no. 553 (‘Landscape by Rembrandt, pen and wash’), with three other drawings, £0.18.0, to Clement;2 ...; collection Ambroise Firmin-Didot (1790-1876), Paris (L. 119); ? his sale, Paris (M. Delestre), 16 April (12 May) 1877 sqq., possibly no. 71 (‘L’Intérieur d’une forêt. Joli dessin à la plume, lavé de sepia. - Collection Wellesley’); ...; collection John Webster (1810-91), Aberdeen (L. 1554); ...; collection Henry Oppenheimer (1859-1932), London, by 1920;3 his sale, London (Christie’s), 10 (13) July 1936 sqq., no. 287, 700 gns, to the dealer P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., London, for Isaac de Bruijn (1872-1953) and his wife, Johanna Geertruida de Bruijn-van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Spiez and Muri, near Bern;4 by whom donated to the museum, 1949, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum (L. 2228), 1960
Object number: RP-T-1961-85
Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
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.
Entry
In the middle of a landscape we see a road, the Amstelveenseweg, disappearing into the distance towards Amstelveen. To the left of this road there is a ditch with a stone bridge over it. A path under the trees leads via an entrance gate to a house, part of the roof of which is represented. On the far right, close to the tree with the S-shaped trunk is the earthwork slope of a small dike that protected the land on the left from flooding.
Rembrandt first drew the scene sketchily with a reed pen. He then used a brush to add the shadow to the side of the bridge and to the tall trees in the middle. The trees in the distance were rendered with just a few lines, the stump in the foreground in broad lines with the reed pen. Rembrandt used his pen very effectively to achieve different tonalities in the ink: not only have the forms been indicated, but a certain atmosphere has been created in which the light brown cartridge paper also plays a part. In other drawings, Rembrandt obtained this effect by toning the paper with a pale brown wash.
There were a few places in the vicinity of Amsterdam where the wealthy bourgeoisie built their country houses: along the Amstel, in Watergraafsmeer or Diemermeer (which had been reclaimed in 1629) and along the road to Amstelveen. Van Regteren Altena assumed that Rembrandt had depicted the Amstelveenseweg in this view, a conclusion later endorsed by Boudewijn Bakker.5
The drawings Rembrandt made in the vicinity of Amsterdam can be divided into several groups. The landscapes were probably always made in series, as exercises and preliminary studies for landscape etchings and as examples for Rembrandt’s students. The present sheet – considered to be one of Rembrandt’s last landscape drawings – can be dated to about 1660 or slightly later, at a time when Rembrandt did not produce any landscape etchings.
Peter Schatborn, 2017
Literature
I.Q. van Regteren Altena, ‘De schenking De Bruijn-van der Leeuw: De Tekeningen’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 9 (1961), nos. 2/3, pp. 70 and 87 from pp. 68-89, no. 41, fig. 23; O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 1368 (c. 1660-62); 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. The Hague 1985, no. 51, with earlier literature; M. Royalton-Kisch, Drawings by Rembrandt and his Circle in the British Museum, exh. cat. London 1992, p. 173, under no. 82; B. Bakker et al., Landscapes of Rembrandt: His Favourite Walks, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Gemeentearchief Amsterdam)/Paris (Institut Néerlandais) 1998-99, p. 323, fig. 4; K.A. Schröder and M. Bisanz-Prakken (eds.), Rembrandt, exh. cat. Vienna (Graphische Sammlung Albertina) 2004, no. 166; M. Schapelhouman, Rembrandt and the Art of Drawing, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 67-68, fig. 61; H. Bevers, W.W. Robinson and P. Schatborn, Drawings by Rembrandt and his Pupils: Telling the Difference, exh. cat. Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum) 2009-10, pp. 193-94, fig. 32.1; J. Bikker et al. Late Rembrandt, exh. cat. London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum), 2014-15, pp. 62 and 307, no. 8; H. Bevers, with a contribution by G.J. Dietz and A. Penz, Zeichnungen der Rembrandtschule im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, coll. cat. Berlin 2018, p. 186, under no. 97; B. Magnusson, Dutch Drawings in Swedish Public Collections, exh. cat. Stockholm (Nationalmuseum) 2018, under no. 334.
Citation
P. Schatborn, 2017, 'Rembrandt van Rijn, View of the Amstelveenseweg outside Amsterdam, Amsterdam, c. 1660 - c. 1662', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.28570
(accessed 20 September 2024 04:46:53).