View of the Ruins of the Colosseum, Rome, with Two Seated Figures

Jan Worst (active c. 1645-1660)

As Houbraken reported, he was a painter of Italianate landscapes and close friend of Johannes Lingelbach (1622-1674), with whom he was in Rome. Since Lingelbach travelled in 1644 to Italy, where he is recorded from 1647 to 1650, this provides a clue for the date of Worst’s stay in the south. Like most of his compatriots, Worst chose the route through France on his way back to the Netherlands, spending at least several months in the area of Lyon. This is confirmed by autograph inscriptions naming French sites on two drawings, one in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the View in Vienne, Looking South toward the Bridge over the Rhône and the Tour de Valois, which is dated 19 July 1655 (inv. no. JWORST 2),¹ and another, whose current whereabouts are unknown, the Old Castle and a Chapel on the Bank of a River, which bears a date of 20 January 1656.² The Rijksprentenkabinet’s inv. no. RP-T-1954-156 is dated the same day as the Rotterdam drawing and although the site is not specified, we know from the subject-matter that it, too, was drawn near Vienne. Worst apparently made panoramic landscapes together with Frederik de Moucheron (1633-1686), who not only worked in a similar style but also sometimes depicted the same views.³

Although Worst must also have been active as a painter, to date only drawings by him are known. This evidently was already the case in the early eighteenth century, when Houbraken stated that ‘one seldom sees his paintings, since he spent most of his time drawing on paper, which drawings were held in high esteem by the connoisseurs’.⁴ In the 1660s, probably after his return to the Netherlands, Worst also drew studio versions of his French landscape drawings for the Atlas Van der Hem, a fifty-volume collection of topographical views assembled by Laurens van der Hem (1621-1678) and now preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.⁵ Although a drawing of a Landscape with Rocks in a River, near the Grande Chartreuse, in the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (inv. no. 1871,575), used to be regarded as his last known work from 1686⁶, Schatborn now interprets the inscribed date as ‘1656’, which situates it in Worst’s French period.⁷

Annemarie Stefes, 2018

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, II (1719), p. 147; G. Jansen and G. Luijten, Italianisanten en bamboccianten. Het italianisierend landschap en genre door Nederlandse kunstenaars uit de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) 1988, p. 119; D. Scrase and T. Vignau-Wilberg, Das goldene Jahrhundert: Holländische Meisterzeichnungen aus dem Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, exh. cat. Munich (Staatliche Graphische Sammlung)/Heidelberg (Kurpfälzisches Museum)/Braunschweig (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum)/Cambridge (Fitzwilliam Museum) 1995-96, under no. 48; P. Schatborn, with J. Verberne, Drawn to Warmth: 17th-century Dutch Artists in Italy, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001, pp. 128-31; S. Alsteens and H. Buijs, Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris 2008, pp. 199, 203-9, 301-6; P. Schatborn, ‘Two Drawings of Tivoli by Jan Worst’, Master Drawings 53 (2015), no. 4, pp. 467-70; P. Schatborn, ‘Drawings by Jan Worst’, Master Drawings 58 (2020), no. 1, pp. 29-78