Boy Lighting a Pipe / verso: Two Men at a Door and a Seated Man with a Child on his Lap

Entry

In the drawing a boy is lighting a long clay pipe over a candle burning in a candlestick on a table. The boy’s head, upper body and right arm are drawn with a fine pen. The scene was then given a light wash in brown and grey, more heavily applied around the flame and the candlestick to suggest darkness.

The subject of a pipe-smoking figure, but this time standing, appears in a drawing formerly in the collection of Mrs C. van der Waals-Koenigs, Heemstede, and subsequently on the New York art market,⁴ which, although sometimes accepted as a Rembrandt because of a ‘signature’ and date (1643), may be the product of a pupil or follower.⁵ There is some similarity in the fine pen lines of the two drawings, but the museum’s drawing is a little more firmly sketched. Although this subject was often portrayed in the seventeenth century, it rarely occurs in the work of the Rembrandt school. In Dutch art, a figure smoking can symbolize the transience of life and/or the sense of Smell.⁶ The drawing of a standing man smoking, which also depicts a table and a drink, could have this emblematic meaning, but the boy lighting a pipe is probably no more than a sketch drawn from life.

The drawing on the verso (fig. a, inv. no. RP-T-1901-A-4521(V)) is much smaller than the sheet and is inscribed within an original framing line, one apparently drawn before the scene was sketched since the figures are rendered right up to its edge. The two different vignettes within the framing line were separated by a vertical, broken line. This convention – establishing a framing line within which to sketch a scene – can be found in drawings by Rembrandt, such as the Raising of Lazarus, in the British Museum, London (inv. no. T,14.6),⁷ and in examples by his teacher, Pieter Lastman (1583-1633), such as the museum’s drawing Landscape with Standing Oriental (inv. no. RP-T-1887-A-1165).

The character of the drawing on the verso is determined mainly by the firm, steady pen strokes and the extremely regular hatching. Some of the hatching is outside the framing line, probably as a pen trail. In order to learn how to render shadows in various tones, the artist had to practice these strokes, and the museum’s drawing is a good example of this sort of exercise. Based on the style, it was probably made by a student in the early 1650s.

Peter Schatborn, 2018