Beggar with Crutches and a Wooden Leg

Entry

The composition of this boxwood statuette of a beggar is based on an etching by Jacques Callot (1592-1635) in his highly popular series from 1622-23, entitled Les Gueux – more accurately, a mirror-image version by an anonymous copyist was used (RP-P-1903-A-23877). At the time of its acquisition, Leeuwenberg cited stylistic grounds to attribute the statuette to the Amsterdam woodcarver Albert Vinckenbrinck (1605-1664).¹ Support for this attribution came from two old sales catalogues listing boxwood reliefs and statuettes purportedly carved by the sculptor after etchings by Callot.² In 1991, Halsema-Kubes nevertheless repudiated this attribution as unfounded.³ Vinckenbrinck’s figures display recognizable, somewhat unwieldy corporeal types, very unlike the well-proportioned, far more slickly executed beggar. The figure also bears no signature, while as far as can be ascertained Vinckenbrinck applied his monogram or name to all of his carvings without exception (cf. BK-15435; BK-KOG-2486; BK-2011-47).

Callot’s genre figures were much loved well into the nineteenth century in France, Germany and the Netherlands, where they formed a popular source of inspiration for engravers, painters and sculptors. Ivory-carved variants of the present Beggar with Crutches and a Wooden Leg also exist, likely made in the first quarter of the eighteenth century in Dresden.⁴ Another ivory inspired by a print from Le Gueux, representing a beggar with his arm in a sling, is preserved at the Musée des Beaux Arts in Lyon, and is localized in the ivory-carving centre of Dieppe and dated to the last quarter of the eighteenth century.⁵ As far as can be ascertained, the Amsterdam statuette is the only boxwood version. The Rijksmuseum acquired the piece from a Paris dealer in 1955. This provenance, in combination with the style and the material used, indicates a date of origin in the second half of the seventeenth century and a manufacture in France or the Southern Netherlands, where a predilection for such meticulously carved cabinet sculptures in boxwood is known to have existed. Contrary to Leeuwenberg’s surmise,⁶ there is no reason to believe that the mirror-image copy of Callot’s etching from which the sculptor worked was printed in the Northern Netherlands.⁷

Bieke van der Mark, 2025