Haman Begging Esther for Mercy / recto: Standing Woman Holding a Child

Entry

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 (Esther 5:7-9). The scene is much more rapidly drawn and is looser in quality than the drawing on the recto of a standing woman holding a child (inv. no. RP-T-1889-A-2059(R)), and it holds the key that led Bevers to endorse Sumowski’s attribution of the sheet to Victors.³

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),⁴ 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).⁵ 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),⁶ and, in reverse, on the recto of a double-sided drawing in the Kunsthalle, Bremen (inv. no. 09/730).⁷ Given its close connection to the two paintings, the latter forms the starting point for the reconstruction of Victors’ drawn oeuvre by Bevers.

The recto of this drawing (fig. a, inv. no. RP-T-1889-A-2059(R)) depicts a woman, who 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),⁸ and Woman with a Child Descending a Staircase in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (inv. no. I, 191)⁹ 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 Victors¹⁰ and Aert de Gelder (1645-1727)¹¹ have been proposed. It has also been suggested that the Standing Woman Holding a Child on the recto was drawn by Rembrandt himself, but that the scene on the verso was sketched by a pupil.¹² The latter supposition is the least probable since the same ink was used for both drawings.

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