Object data
reed pen and brown ink, some areas deliberately rubbed with a finger or brush, with opaque white; later additions in pen and light brown ink; framing line in light brown ink
height 218 mm × width 178 mm
Willem Drost (attributed to)
Tobias and the Angel with the Fish
Amsterdam, c. 1650 - c. 1655
Inscriptions
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inscribed on verso: upper right, in pencil (with the 1883 De Vos sale no.), de Vos 424; lower left, in blue pencil, 27; lower right, in pencil (with the 1906 Hofstede de Groot no.), deG 1165
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stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228); below this, with the mark of the Vereniging Rembrandt (L. 2135)
Technical notes
Watermark: None
Condition
A strip of paper approximately 20 mm wide has been added to the left side; upper right corner repaired; several small light brown stains; light foxing
Provenance
…; collection Jacob de Vos Jbzn (1803-78), Amsterdam (L. 1450); his widow, Abrahamina Henrietta de Vos-Wurfbain (1808-83), Amsterdam; his sale, Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 22 May 1883 sqq., no. 424, as Rembrandt, with fifteen other drawings, fl. 480 for all, to the dealer J.H. Balfoort for the Vereniging Rembrandt;1 from whom on loan to the museum, 1883; from whom, as Rembrandt, fl. 5,049, with 166 other drawings, to the museum (L. 2228), 1889
Object number: RP-T-1889-A-2053
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Willem Drost (Amsterdam 1633 - Venice 1659)
He was baptized in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, on 19 April 1633.2 Houbraken mentions that he was a pupil of Rembrandt and that he worked in Rome for a long time.3 Before he entered Rembrandt’s workshop, probably at the end of the 1640s, he may have studied under Rembrandt’s pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) in the mid-1640s. After Drost left Amsterdam for Italy, where he is documented in Venice from 1655, he abandoned his Rembrandtesque manner and adopted the powerful chiaroscuro style of the Venetian tenebrists. He may have worked only briefly in Rome, but was mostly active in Venice, where he trained Johann Carl Loth (1632–1698), among others, and he is now known to have died there from pneumonia in 1659, at the age of only 25.4 The rediscovery of his burial record in Venice on 25 February 1659 means that many painted works with later dates traditionally ascribed to him have recently been removed from his oeuvre. On the basis of his choice of subject and style, the majority of his drawings seem to have originated during his apprenticeship in Amsterdam under Rembrandt.
Entry
After having been considered to be by Rembrandt by scholars for over seventy-five years, this drawing was catalogued as an early example by Drost by Schatborn in 1985.5 The regular parallel hatching, the sketchy, interrupted contour lines and the awkward passages, such as the hands and feet of Tobias, make an attribution to Rembrandt unlikely. These characteristics can, however, be found in drawings by Drost of the early 1650s. A comparable drawing is The Angel Departing from the Family of Tobit of circa 1652 in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (inv. no. I, 197),6 which the artist based on an etching by Rembrandt of 1641 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-83). Both drawings are executed with a relatively fine, occasionally scratchy pen line, whereas some areas have been drawn with broader strokes of a reed pen. Drost also smudged the ink with a finger or brush before it was dry, in the case of the present drawing to create shadow under the wing of the Archangel Raphael. Rembrandt used exactly the same trick to shade the inside of the angel’s wing in his drawing of Manoah’s Offering of circa 1652 in the Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris (inv. no. 5803).7
The tip of the archangel’s staff, the rippling water in the foreground (representing the Tigris) and the framing lines are later additions in a lighter shade of brown ink. The ink scribbles under the stick probably depict the tail of the large fish, which must have been cut off when the sheet was trimmed. The angel points to the fish, the gall of which will cure the blindness of Tobias’ father (Tobit 6:2).
Bonny van Sighem, 2000/Marleen Ram, 2018
Literature
C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1165 (as Rembrandt); W.R. Valentiner, Rembrandt: Die Meisters Handzeichnungen, 2 vols., Stuttgart and elsewhere 1925-34, I (1925), no. 229 (as Rembrandt, c. 1640); Bijbelse kunst in het Rijksmuseum, exh. cat. Amsterdam 1939, no. 68f (as Rembrandt); M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1942, no. 56, with additional earlier literature (as Rembrandt); I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Mostra di incisioni e disegni di Rembrandt, exh. cat. Rome (Museo di Palazzo Venezia)/Florence (Gabinetto Disegni e Stampe degli Uffizi) 1951, no. 82 (as Rembrandt); Bibeln eller den Heliga Skrift med bilder av Rembrandt, Stockholm 1954, fig. 102 (as Rembrandt); S. Vestdijk, Rembrandt en de engelen: Twaalf gedichten en een acrostichon, The Hague 1956, pp. 3, repr., and 68 (as Rembrandt); W. Wegner, Rembrandt-Zeichnungen, exh. cat. Munich (Staatliche Graphische Sammlung) 1957, no. 18 (as Rembrandt); H.M. Rotermund, Das Buch Tobias erzählt und ausgelegt durch Zeichnungen und Radierungen Rembrandts, Stuttgart 1961, p. 10, repr. on cover (as Rembrandt); O. Benesch, Rembrandt: Werk und Forschung (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), Lucerne 1970 (orig. edn. Vienna 1935), p. 40 (as Rembrandt); O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 573 (as Rembrandt); P. Schatborn, ‘Tekeningen van Rembrandts leerlingen’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 33 (1985), no. 2, p. 101; D.A. de Witt, L. van Sloten and J. van der Veen, Rembrandt’s Late Pupils: Studying under a Genius, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2015, p. 124, no. 50
Citation
B. van Sighem, 2000/M. Ram, 2019, 'attributed to Willem Drost, Tobias and the Angel with the Fish, Amsterdam, c. 1650 - c. 1655', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.36083
(accessed 27 November 2024 06:50:59).