Rijksmuseum

Object data

pen and grey ink, with grey wash, over traces of graphite; framing line in black ink

height 96 mm × width 166 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed and dated by the artist: upper right, in brown ink, Harly — 1667
inscribed on verso: upper centre, in a nineteenth-century hand, in graphite (partially erased), Josua de grave del Lh C?; below that, Geschenk Beele v Heemstede / April 1898; behind that, in pencil, the mark of an unknown collector (L. 178c); lower left, with the mark of Wolff & Cohen (L. 2610); behind that, in brown ink, 91?; below that, in brown ink, the mark of an unknown collector (L. 611b); next to that, in graphite, r, g.o?; next to that, in graphite, T 98 40 / h 97 /_ b 167_
stamped on verso: lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

watermark: none

Provenance

…; unknown collector (L. 611b); …; unknown collector (L. 178c); …; collection Frederik Carel Theodoor, Baron van Isendoorn à Blois, Heer van Feluy and De Cannenburch (1784-1865), Kasteel De Cannenburch, Vaassen (L. 1407); inherited by Franciscus Johannes Hallo (1808-79), Kasteel De Cannenburch, Vaassen;¹ sold through the mediation of the dealers A.E. Cohen and M. Wolff (L. 2610);² …; collection Leonard Marius Beels van Heemstede (1825-82), Amsterdam; his widow, Jonkvrouwe Agnes Henriette Beels van Heemstede-van Loon (1829-1902), Amsterdam;³ by whom donated to the museum (L. 2228), with an unknown number of other drawings, 1898

Object number: RP-T-1898-A-3538

Credit line: Gift of A.H. Beels van Heemstede-van Loon

The artist

Josua de Grave (Amsterdam 1643 - The Hague 1712)

He was the son of the French merchant Claude Pietersz de Grave [Graeff] (c. 1597/98-after 1667) and Sara Bols (?-c. 1655) and was baptized in the Oude Kerk, Amsterdam, on 2 July 1643.⁴ De Grave had three brothers and two sisters.⁵ He grew up in Haarlem, where the family moved soon after his birth. In 1659, at age sixteen, he entered the Haarlem Guild of St Luke,⁶ but it is unknown with whom he trained. Based on a drawing dated 1663, depicting a landscape in the vicinity of Paris, now in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 2480),⁷ we know that he moved to Paris during or after his training. De Grave lived in Paris until 1668, after which he moved to Maastricht.

In Maastricht he likely met Barend Klotz (?-?) and Valentijn Klotz (c. 1646-1721), two fellow draughtsmen affiliated with the Dutch army.⁸ Until 1670, the trio resided in Maastricht, where they made around sixty drawings of the city and its surroundings. Only a handful of these drawings are signed (e.g. inv. nos. RP-T-1946-63 and RP-T-1911-100).⁹ In the following decades, the three artists accompanied the army of the Dutch States-General under the Stadholder Prince Willem III of Orange Nassau (1650-1702) on their various campaigns: to Bergen op Zoom (1671-early 1672), cities around the Dutch ‘waterlinie’ (1672) and various regions in the southern Netherlands and present-day Belgium (1674, 1675 and 1676).

On 3 December 1670, De Grave married Jenneton de Bisson (1645-?) in Maastricht.¹⁰ The newlyweds moved from Maastricht to The Hague, joining De Grave’s sister and his brother, Cornelis, who had moved there already.¹¹ After each military campaign, De Grave returned to The Hague, where he settled permanently after the last campaign in 1676 and died in July 1712.¹² Several drawings dated between the 1670s and the 1710s record sights around the city. In the final years of his career, he also produced paintings and drawings of (Italianate) gardens and fantasy landscapes (e.g. inv. nos. RP-T-00-148 and RP-T-1895-A-3063).

Josua de Grave often signed his work, using his full name or a variation, such as J. de Grave or Josua de Grave fecit. In many instances, he also included a location and a date. His signature is usually followed by a colon, then the year and the day and month (expressed as a fraction). His handwriting is quite distinct, using elegant, curly (capital) letters and a typical old-fashioned letter ‘e’. His drawings were initially quickly sketched in graphite or black chalk, after which he applied brown ink lines to further work out the composition. He seemed to have relied on a certain formula for most of his drawings, placing the horizon in the centre of the sheet and scattering the main elements around it. He often included trees, foliage or figures closer to the foreground, creating a repoussoir. De Grave drew his trees by outlining the trunks and branches, then scribbling in the leaves using cloud-like shapes.¹³ In most instances, in addition to the brown ink composition, grey washes are applied sparingly, particularly for the shadows on houses and roofs, foliage and simple cloud formations. Drawings that are more heavily washed are likely to have been worked up by (a) later hand(s).

Carolyn Mensing, 2019

References

R. van Eijnden and A. van der Willigen, ‘Klotz, Valentijn’, in U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XX (1927), pp. 549-50; R.J.G.M. van Hasselt, ‘Drie tekenaars van topografische prenten in Brabant en elders. Valentijn Klotz, Josua de Grave en Constantijn Huygens Jr.’, Jaarboek Oudheidkundige Kring ‘De Ghulden Roos’ 25 (1965), pp. 145-55; M.H. Breitbarth-van der Stok, ‘Josua de Grave, Valentinus Klotz en Bernardus Klotz’, Bulletin Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond 68 (1969), pp. 96-98; J.H. van Mosselveld and W.A. van Ham, Tekeningen van Bergen op Zoom. Topografische afbeeldingen van Bergen op Zoom en omgeving uit de zestiende tot en met de achttiende eeuw, exh. cat. Bergen op Zoom (Markiezenhof) 1973-74, pp. 15-18; G. Gordon, ‘Grave, Josua de’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., London/New York 1996, XIII, pp. 323-24

Entry

This sheet and inv. no. RP-T-1898-A-3539 – both dated 1667 – are the earliest known drawings by De Grave. The artist lived in Paris between 1663 and 1668 and probably made these drawings while travelling in northern France. The two drawings were carried out shortly after each other: the two villages, Gauchy and Harly, are only four kilometers apart in the Aisne department of Hauts-de-France. The drawings are more restrained compared to his later work, in which outlines of buildings and foliage are more pronounced. After the initial outlines with thin grey pen lines in the present work, De Grave sparsely applied grey washes to mimic the effect of the shadows cast by clouds passing over the rolling hills.

Based on the collectors' marks on the versos of both sheets, they were likely in the same collections since at least the eighteenth-century, before they entered the collection of Baron Frederik Carel Theodoor van Isendoorn à Blois (1784-1865), who owned an important collection of Dutch drawings. They were sold at an unknown date through the mediation of the dealers A.E. Cohen and M. Wolff and might have been bought by the Dutch patrician Leonard Marius Beels van Heemstede (1825-82), whose wife donated the drawings to the museum in 1898.

Carolyn Mensing, 2020

Citation

C. Mensing, 2020, 'Josua de Grave, View of the Village of Harly, Aisne, Hauts-de-France, Harly, 1667', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.51832

(accessed 23 November 2024 15:56:29).