Object data
reed pen and brown ink; framing line in brown ink
height 170 mm × width 129 mm
Jan Victors (attributed to)
Standing Woman Holding a Child / verso: Haman Begging Esther for Mercy
Amsterdam, c. 1635 - c. 1638
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, 33; below this, in pencil, f 10; lower right, in pencil (with the 1906 Hofstede de Groot no.), 1196
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stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of the Vereniging Rembrandt (L. 2135); next to this, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)
Technical notes
Watermark: Letters LP
Condition
Light foxing throughout
Provenance
...; collection Jacob de Vos Jbzn (1803-78), Amsterdam, by 1868;1 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 school of Rembrandt, with fifteen other drawings, fl. 480 for all, to the dealer J.H. Balfoort for the Vereniging Rembrandt (L. 2135);2 from whom on loan to the museum, 1883; from whom, fl. 5,049, with 166 other drawings, to the museum (L. 2228), 1889
Object number: RP-T-1889-A-2059(R)
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
Entry
A woman has placed her left leg on a step to help support the weight of the child she is carrying. The rather angry-looking child wears a typical toddler’s head protector (to cushion his head if he falls) and extends his hand towards the woman’s face. Rembrandt drew this subject multiple times in the mid-1630s, the same period that Victors served an apprenticeship under him. Comparable is Rembrandt’s drawing on the verso of Woman with a Child Frightened by a Dog in the Collection Frits Lugt, Fondation Custodia, Paris (inv. no. 5155),3 and Woman with a Child Descending a Staircase in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (inv. no. I, 191).4 The figures in the present drawing were sketched with some bravura, using heavy, broad pen lines. Not all the forms are well-structured, and the blank areas, such as the woman’s skirt, seem rather empty. The shadows on the right forearm of the woman and under the child were indicated with broad hatching. The multi-direction hatching between the two heads is very striking. There are dark shaded areas around the woman’s eyes and mouth.
The attribution of both the recto and the verso studies to Rembrandt has repeatedly been doubted, and the names of Jan Victors5 and Aert de Gelder (1645-1727)6 have been proposed. It has also been suggested that the Standing Woman Holding a Child was drawn by Rembrandt himself, but that the scene on the verso was sketched by a pupil.7 The latter supposition is the least probable since the same ink was used for both drawings.
The biblical sketch on the verso (fig. a, inv. no. RP-T-1889-A-2059(V)) (Esther 5:7-9) is much more rapidly drawn and is looser in quality, and it holds the key that led Bevers to endorse Sumowski’s attribution of the sheet to Victors.8 Esther is seated near a table, with Haman bowing or kneeling before her with clasped hands (his upper body is drawn in two different positions). Ahasuerus stands behind the table, having just learnt from his wife that his confidant Haman has passed a decree ordering all Jews to be killed.
The composition of the drawing is related to two depictions of this scene by Victors, a signed and dated painting of 1642 in the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig (inv. no. GG 253),9 and a painting that is attributed to him on stylistic grounds and dated to the late 1630s in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum, Cologne (inv. no. MRW 1016).10 The composition occurs again in an equally sketchy drawing on the verso of Woman Making Pancakes in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow (inv. no. 4712),11 and, in reverse, on the recto of a double-sided drawing in the Kunsthalle, Bremen (inv. no. 09/730).12 Given its close connection to the two paintings, the latter forms the starting point for the reconstruction of Victors’ drawn oeuvre by Bevers.
The penwork in the Amsterdam drawing on both the recto and verso is similar to the sketchy Rembrandtesque drawing on the recto of the Bremen sheet, especially the thicker, broken contour lines, the multi-direction hatching and the use of small circles for the eyes. On the basis of these stylistic similarities and its connection with the two paintings, the present sheet is here attributed to Victors.
Peter Schatborn, 2018
Literature
C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1196 (as Rembrandt); W.R. Valentiner, Rembrandt: Die Meisters Handzeichnungen, 2 vols., Stuttgart and elsewhere 1925-34, I (1925), no. 202 (as Rembrandt?, 1638); J.C. Van Dyke, The Rembrandt Drawings and Etchings, New York/London 1927, p. 81 (as Aert de Gelder); 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. 26 (verso as pupil, 1641); O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. A 63 (as pupil, 1650s); P. Schatborn, Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, IV: Tekeningen van Rembrandt, zijn onbekende leerlingen en navolgers/Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1985, no. 90 (as school of Rembrandt), with earlier literature; W. Sumowski, _Drawings of the Rembrandt School, 10 vols., New York 1979-92, X (1992), nos. 2342** (verso) and 2345** (recto); V. Sadkov et al., Netherlandish, Flemish and Dutch Drawings of the XVI-XVIII Centuries, Belgian and Dutch Drawings of the XIX-XX Centuries: The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, coll. cat. Moscow 2010, pp. 270-71, under no. 427, n. 8; H. Bevers, ‘Drawings by Jan Victors: The Shaping of an “Oeuvre” of a Rembrandt Pupil’, Master Drawings 49 (2011), no. 3, figs. 6 (verso) and 34 (recto)
Citation
P. Schatborn, 2018, 'attributed to Jan Victors, Standing Woman Holding a Child / verso: Haman Begging Esther for Mercy, Amsterdam, c. 1635 - c. 1638', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.28610
(accessed 29 December 2024 12:51:59).