Landscape with the Church of Sint Engelmundus, Driehuis, near Velsen

Entry

The general location – Velsen (or Velzen), a village some seven kilometres north of Haarlem in the province of Noord-Holland – is known thanks to the inscription by the artist at upper centre. However, the site can be even more precisely identified as Driehuis (located one kilometre further north and part of the municipality of Velsen), on the basis of the tower of the church of Sint Engelmundus rising above the skyline. In the foreground is a ghostly figure with a staff walking in the dunes.

The sheet’s traditional attribution to Jacob van Ruisdael (1626-1682) – accepted by Rosenberg in 1928 – was correctly rejected by Simon (1930) and every scholar since then. Giltaij noted that the drawing’s style and composition were closely related to several landscape drawings formerly ascribed to Ruisdael, which he assigned to his ‘Problem Group 3’.¹ This group includes two topographical drawings in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich, both of which are similarly inscribed with the location at upper centre: one sheet is a View of Beverwijk (inv. no. 1789),² the other a View of St Maarten (inv. no. 11445).³ To this group Slive added a View of a Town (Weesp?) in the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (inv. no. Mas.1948).⁴ One might also tentatively include with this group the Rijksmuseum’s Landscape with a Castle near the Bank of a River (inv. no. RP-T-1954-98), also once ascribed to Ruisdael: it shares roughly the same format and has traces of an inscription identifying the location at upper centre.

There is no consensus over the identity of the draughtsman. The drawings cannot be executed by Jacob Esselens (1626-1687), to whom the two drawings in Munich were once attributed. Following a suggestion by Schatborn, Vignau-Wilberg proposed as the author of the Munich views the name of Guillam Du Bois (1623-1680), to whom a drawing in a private collection in Germany was classified.⁵ While there is a stylistic coherence within this group of landscape sketches, they have little in common with the lacy style of the ex-Ruisdael drawings that Giltaij assigned to Du Bois.⁶ It took Giltaij nearly thirty years to identify the author of his ‘Problem Group 1’.⁷ It can only be hoped that the correct identity of the artists of ‘Problem Group 2’ and ‘Problem Group 3’ will one day come to light. Slive mooted the attractive, but so far unprovable theory that the author of ‘Problem Group 3’ might be Jacob’s father, Isaack van Ruisdael (1599-1677).⁸

Ingrid Oud, 2000/Jane Shoaf Turner, 2019