Rijksmuseum

Object data

pen and brown ink, with brown, grey, pink and two shades of green wash

height 132 mm × width 237 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed on verso: centre right (on the gate of the estate), in brown ink, Hoge Vegt
stamped on verso: centre left, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

Watermark: Hardly legible owing to the colored wash on the verso

Condition

Light foxing throughout; an oval shaped stain along the right side of the sheet

Provenance

…; from the dealer F. Muller, Amsterdam, as Johannes Leupenius, fl. 20, to the museum (L. 2228), 1888

Object number: RP-T-1888-A-1430X(V)

Context

The artist

Abraham Rutgers (Amsterdam 1632 - Amsterdam 1699)

He came from a long line of Mennonite textile merchants, who left Antwerp because of religious persecution, settling first in Haarlem and later in Amsterdam.¹ Abraham followed in the family profession, working as a silk merchant in Amsterdam. He copied drawings by, and was close friends with, fellow silk merchant and amateur artist Jacob Esselens (1626/28-1687), to whose children he was appointed guardian just before Esselens’s burial on 15 January 1687.² He also collaborated with Ludolf Bakhuizen (1630-1708), who added figures to at least one of Rutgers’ drawings, a sheet now in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. no. 10015).³

Most of all, however, Rutgers is known for his topographical views along the Vecht, near Utrecht, drawn with distinctive brown ink hatching and strong, diagonally receding compositions. Besides three large albums of his drawings, one in the collection of the Museum Simon van Gijn, Dordrecht (inv. no. SIK 10), and two that in 2018 appeared on the Haarlem art market,⁴ consisting of drawings described as principale (drawings after life), inventieve (imaginary scenes) and copijen (copies after other artists), another large group was preserved in the Atlas Munnicks van Cleeff, now part of the John and Marine van Vlissingen Art Foundation.

Abraham’s cousin was Agneta Blok (1629-1704), the famous patron, horticulturalist and collector who commissioned artists to record the plants she grew in her garden at Vijverhof, her estate on the Vecht. There were close ties between the two families. Abraham’s father, banker and cloth merchant David Rutgers II (1601-1668), was Agneta’s uncle, and his mother was Susanna de Flines (1607-1677), the aunt of Agneta’s second husband, Sybrand de Flines (1623-1697). Abraham’s grandson Antoni Rutgers the Younger (1695-1778) was a collector and marchand amateur, whose collection of drawings was sold at auction in Amsterdam on 1 December 1778.

Jane Shoaf Turner, 2019

References
U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXIX (1935), p. 239; J.W. Niemeijer, ‘Varia Topografica, IV. Een album met Utrechtse gezichten door Abraham Rutgers’, Oud-Holland 79 (1964), no. 2, pp. 127-34; I.H. van Eeghen, ‘Abraham en Antoni Rutgers. De kunstzin van grootvader en kleinzoon’, Jaarboek Amstelodamum 67 (1975), pp. 174-88; E. Munnig Schmidt, ‘Abraham Rutgers en Ludolf Backhuysen samen op het ijs’, Jaarboekje van het Oudheidkundig Genootschap “Niftarlake”, 2006, pp. 57-58; J. Turner and R.-J. te Rijdt (eds.), Home and Abroad: Dutch and Flemish Landscape Drawings from the John and Marine van Vlissingen Art Foundation, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Paris (Fondation Custodia) 2015-16, p. 132, under nos. 54-56 (text by J. Shoaf Turner)

Entry

On the recto of this double-sided sheet, two men try their luck at fishing along the banks of a pond or river, almost certainly the River Vecht, where Rutgers and various members of his family owned property, including the one represented on the verso. When this sheet was acquired in 1888, it was thought to be by Johannes Leupenius (1643-1693), an artist to whom many drawings by Rutgers have been attributed. However, the style of the drawing is unmistakably that of Rutgers. The recto features the artist’s idiosyncratic, boldly receding sense of perspective, with prominent hatching in brown ink. Stylistically, it closely resembles most of the drawings that form part of the three known albums by Rutgers, one with 88 drawings dated 1686 and 1687 in the collection of the Museum Simon van Gijn, Dordrecht (inv. no. SIK 10), and two, with a total of 130 drawings, that appeared in 2018 on the Haarlem art market.⁵

The coloured washes on the verso of this drawing are highly unusual, though they seem to be original. As the name ‘Hoge Vegt’ inscribed on the pediment of the gate indicates, the view is of the entrance to the artist’s own country house, Hoogevecht (destr. c. 1830), located just north of Maarssen. He bought the property in 1682 from Antonio Alvares Machado (alias Jacob de Mercado; 1643-1706), a Portuguese-Jewish merchant who made a fortune supplying Stadhouder Willem III (1650-1702) with bread for his army of 30,000 Dutch troops during the Forty Years’ War with the French (1672-1712).⁶ Hoogevecht was situated at Zandpad, 27, near Groenevecht, the estate built by Rutgers’s father, which was inherited by his older brother, David Rutgers III (1629-1706). The formal gardens of Abraham’s estate – of which we see a glimpse in the sketch on the verso – were probably designed by Daniël Marot I (1661/64-1752). They can be seen in an etching of 1719, Hoogevechts gesigt van binnen over de Kom en Terrassen, by Daniël Stoopendaal (1672-1726), no. 18, in the series De zegepraalende Vecht, vertoonende verscheidene Gesichten van Lustplaatsen, Heeren huysen en dorpen, Beginnende van Uitrecht en met Muyden besluytende.