Object data
black chalk; framing line in chalk or graphite (right edge)
height 190 mm × width 109 mm
Gerrit Berckheyde
Standing Youth in a Large Hat, with a Basket under his Arm
Haarlem, c. 1670 - 1698
Inscriptions
Technical notes
watermark: foolscap (fragment)
Condition
Brown and brownish-green oil stains; small hole on the right edge below centre
Provenance
...; sale, Jacob de Vos Jbzn (1803-78, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 22 May 1883 sqq., no. 52 (‘Hiob Berkheyden. Feuilles d’étude. - Trois dessins. A la sanguine et à la pierre noire’), fl. 48, to the Vereniging Rembrandt (L. 2135), for the museum (L. 2228) as J. Berckheyde1
Object number: RP-T-1883-A-264
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Gerrit Berckheyde (Haarlem, 1638 - Haarlem, 1698)
He was probably trained by his older brother, Job Berckheyde (1630-1693). In the 1650s, as a young teenager, Gerrit travelled with Job along the Rhine to Heidelberg to study and draw German architecture.2
The brothers established themselves in their native Haarlem around 1653-54 and probably shared a workshop.3 Gerrit joined the Guild of St Luke on 27 July 1660.4 He specialized in townscapes. Gerrit drew figure studies in red and black chalk to be used as staffage for his paintings, a large number of which have been preserved. The models for these drawings were shared among Haarlem artists and recorded by different hands during joint drawing sessions. In the past Gerrit’s drawings have thus often been confused with those of other Haarlem artists, especially Cornelis Bega (1631-1664).5 He is not known to have had students, but he collaborated with Jan van Huchtenburg (1647-1733) and possibly Nicolas Guérard (?-1719), Dirk Maas (1656-1717) and Johannes Lingelbach (1622-1674).6
From 1666 to 1681, Gerrit was a member of the Haarlem society of rhetoricians, the ‘Wijngaardranken’. He served as an official for the Haarlem Guild of St Luke between 1691 and 1695. He died unexpectedly on 10 January 1698, when he fell into the Brouwersvaart and drowned. He was buried in the nave of the St Jan four days later.7
Carolyn Mensing, 2020
References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, III (1721), pp. 189-97; A. van der Willigen, Geschiedkundige aantekeningen over Haarlemsche schilders, Haarlem 1866, p. 70; U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, III (1909), p. 376; H. Jantzen, Das niederländische Architecturbild, Leipzig 1910, pp. 87-88; H. Gerson, Ausbreitung und Nachwirkung der holländischen Malerei des 17. Jahrhunderts, Amsterdam 1942, pp. 168, 204, 25; B. Haak, Hollandse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw, Amsterdam 1984, p. 392; C. Lawrence, Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde (1638-1698): Haarlem Cityscape Painter, Doornspijk 1991; C. Lawrence, ‘Berckheyde Family’, Grove Art Online, 2003, online at https://www.oxfordartonline.com/groveart/view/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.001.0001/oao-9781884446054-e-7000008029; I. van Thiel-Stroman, ‘Gerrit Adriaensz Berckheyde’, in P. Biesboer et al., Painting in Haarlem, 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 105-06
Entry
Gerrit Berckheyde used his chalk figure studies – many of which were formerly attributed to Cornelis Bega (1631-1664) – as the basis for the staffage in his townscapes. Since Schatborn’s 1981 publication on figure studies, including examples by several Haarlem draughtsmen,8 it has become easier to distinguish the hands of Berckheyde and Bega. Berckheyde’s hatching is less rigid and more rounded, and the contrasts between light and dark passages less intense. His figures tend not to be silhouetted by extensive hatched backgrounds, and he often drew broad hands with fat fingers.
When Berckheyde wanted to include staffage in his paintings, he selected suitable figure studies from his considerable cache of drawings, which he assembled in ever-different combinations in his pictures. The same types can thus be seen in different paintings. To increase his options, he made counterproofs of his chalk figure studies in order to paint them in reverse. Occasionally, he also altered the clothing or attributes of the figures.
No such changes, however, were made by Berckheyde when he incorporated the present study in several paintings datable from circa 1670 and later, the Italianate Landscape with a Vegetable Market, which was on the Amsterdam art market in 1985;9 the Oriental Market Hall, which was on the Munich art market in 1971;10 and the View of Cologne, with the Church of the Holy Apostles in the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, Cologne (inv. no. KSM 1903/41).11 The pose, clothing and attributes of the boy in the paintings are identical to those in the Rijksmuseum drawing. The same study was used – this time in reverse and with minor changes in the boy’s clothes – in a painting in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the View along the Rhine near the Church of St Cunibert, Cologne (inv. no. 1042).12 The Rijksmuseum preserves another figure study for the Boijmans painting, the Seated Man Drinking (inv. no. RP-T-1989-106), and a second figure study for the painted Oriental Market Hall also survives, the Young Woman Seated at a Barrel in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (inv. no. 1996.3), which was also once given to Bega.13
The boy represented here, with his large, soft hat, was one of Berckheyde’s favourite models. The artist drew him several times in different poses, for instance on a sheet in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 314),14 which the artist employed, among others, for his painted View of Heidelberg now in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv. no. KMSsp536).15 The same youth was depicted in a drawing classified as Bega in the Groninger Museum, Groningen (inv. no. 1919.0439),16 and possibly in another study by a different hand, executed in black and white chalk on blue paper, that was auctioned as circle of Berckheyde in New York in 1990.17
Bonny van Sighem, 2001/Jane Shoaf Turner, 2020
Literature
P. Schatborn, Hollandse genre-tekeningen uit de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1973, p. 19, under no. 8; P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, no. 15; M.A. Scott, Cornelis Bega (1631/32-1664) as Painter and Draughtsman, 2 vols., Ann Arbor (MI) 1984 (PhD diss., University of Maryland), pp. 132-33, 430, no. GB3, fig. 189; J.F. Heijbroek (ed.), De verzameling van mr. Carel Vosmaer (1826-1888), exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1989, p. 70, under no. 26; C. Lawrence, Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde (1638-1698): Haarlem Cityscape Painter, Doornspijk 1991, p. 19 (n. 20); W.W. Robinson, Seventeenth-century Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Vienna (Graphische Sammlung Albertina)/New York (Pierpont Morgan Library)/Cambridge (MA) (Fogg Art Museum) 1991-92, p. 206, under no. 94; B.P.J. Broos and M. Schapelhouman, Nederlandse tekenaars geboren tussen 1600 en 1660, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1993 (Oude tekeningen in het bezit van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, waaronder de collectie Fodor, vol. 4), p. 40, under no. 26, n. 1, 2, 4; C. Lawrence, ‘Gerrit (Adriaensz.) Berckheyde’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., London/New York 1996, III, p. 762; Th. le Claire, Women Observed: Twenty Master Drawings, exh. cat. Hamburg (Le Claire Kunst) 1996, no. 8, fig. 2; J. Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, 2 vols., coll. cat. New York 2006, p. 34, under no. 27 (n. 2); G. Luijten et al., Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art)/Paris (Fondation Custodia) 2016-17, no. 123
Citation
B. Van Sighem, 2001/J. Turner, 2020, 'Gerrit Berckheyde, Standing Youth in a Large Hat, with a Basket under his Arm, Haarlem, c. 1670 - 1698', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.27416
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