Skaters on a River

? Vecht, c. 1682 - c. 1699

Object data

pen and brown ink, with brown and grey wash, over graphite; framing line in brown ink

height 191 mm × width 312 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed on verso, in pencil: lower left, l; next to that, ƒ 520”2; next to that, 338; above that, in a nineteenth-century hand, Amstel; next to that, in a nineteenth-century hand, Leupenius; above that, N60 / f 60; centre right, Rutgers
stamped on verso: lower right, with the mark of Pitcairn Knowles (L. 2643); centre left, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

Watermark: Foolscap with five points, above the number 4 above three balls

Condition

Light foxing throughout; repairs upper left corner of verso

Provenance

…; collection William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2643); his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25 June 1895 sqq., no. 572, fl. 20, to the dealer H.J. Valk for the Vereniging Rembrandt; from whom on loan to the museum, 1895; from whom, fl. 23, to the museum (L. 2228), 1902

Object number: RP-T-1902-A-4567

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Abraham Rutgers (Amsterdam 1632 - Amsterdam 1699)

He came from a long line of Mennonite textile merchants, who left Antwerp because of religious persecution, settling first in Haarlem and later in Amsterdam.¹ Abraham followed in the family profession, working as a silk merchant in Amsterdam. He copied drawings by, and was close friends with, fellow silk merchant and amateur artist Jacob Esselens (1626/28-1687), to whose children he was appointed guardian just before Esselens’s burial on 15 January 1687.² He also collaborated with Ludolf Bakhuizen (1630-1708), who added figures to at least one of Rutgers’ drawings, a sheet now in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. no. 10015).³

Most of all, however, Rutgers is known for his topographical views along the Vecht, near Utrecht, drawn with distinctive brown ink hatching and strong, diagonally receding compositions. Besides three large albums of his drawings, one in the collection of the Museum Simon van Gijn, Dordrecht (inv. no. SIK 10), and two that in 2018 appeared on the Haarlem art market,⁴ consisting of drawings described as principale (drawings after life), inventieve (imaginary scenes) and copijen (copies after other artists), another large group was preserved in the Atlas Munnicks van Cleeff, now part of the John and Marine van Vlissingen Art Foundation.

Abraham’s cousin was Agneta Blok (1629-1704), the famous patron, horticulturalist and collector who commissioned artists to record the plants she grew in her garden at Vijverhof, her estate on the Vecht. There were close ties between the two families. Abraham’s father, banker and cloth merchant David Rutgers II (1601-1668), was Agneta’s uncle, and his mother was Susanna de Flines (1607-1677), the aunt of Agneta’s second husband, Sybrand de Flines (1623-1697). Abraham’s grandson Antoni Rutgers the Younger (1695-1778) was a collector and marchand amateur, whose collection of drawings was sold at auction in Amsterdam on 1 December 1778.

Jane Shoaf Turner, 2019

References
U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXIX (1935), p. 239; J.W. Niemeijer, ‘Varia Topografica, IV. Een album met Utrechtse gezichten door Abraham Rutgers’, Oud-Holland 79 (1964), no. 2, pp. 127-34; I.H. van Eeghen, ‘Abraham en Antoni Rutgers. De kunstzin van grootvader en kleinzoon’, Jaarboek Amstelodamum 67 (1975), pp. 174-88; E. Munnig Schmidt, ‘Abraham Rutgers en Ludolf Backhuysen samen op het ijs’, Jaarboekje van het Oudheidkundig Genootschap “Niftarlake”, 2006, pp. 57-58; J. Turner and R.-J. te Rijdt (eds.), Home and Abroad: Dutch and Flemish Landscape Drawings from the John and Marine van Vlissingen Art Foundation, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Paris (Fondation Custodia) 2015-16, p. 132, under nos. 54-56 (text by J. Shoaf Turner)

Entry

One of the drawings in the album of eighty-eight drawings by Rutgers, dated 1686 and 1687, in the Museum Simon van Gijn, Dordrecht (fig. a), shows a similar motif of a view of a river with skaters alongside a road with prominent crossed trees, a motif that serves as a daring compositional repoussoir.⁵ Another sheet of virtually the same size, formerly in the Van Regteren Altena collection and now in a private collection, New York, shows a similar subject.⁶ In that work, however, Rutgers transformed the horizontal composition into a vertical one, making the river less prominent, but the screen of crossed tree-trunks more powerful.

Although neither this nor the other two views can be precisely identified, it – like the others – almost certainly shows a scene on the Vecht (where Rutgers and his family, like many of the Amsterdam élite, had country houses),⁷ despite the nineteenth-century inscription Amstel on the verso of the sheet.

Ingrid Oud, 2000/Lukas Nonner, 2019

Literature

M. Schapelhouman and P. Schatborn, Land & water. Hollandse tekeningen uit de 17de eeuw in het Rijksprentenkabinet/Land & Water: Dutch Drawings from the 17th Century in the Rijksmuseum Print Room, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1987, no. 91

Citation

I. Oud, 2000/L. Nonner, 2019, 'Abraham Rutgers, Skaters on a River, Vecht, c. 1682 - c. 1699', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.59742

(accessed 23 September 2024 05:16:56).

Figures

Abraham Rutgers, *River Landscape with Skaters*, c. 1686 - c. 1687. Pen and brown ink, with brown wash, 117 x 188 mm. Dordrecht, Huis Van Gijn, inv. no. VGB1000.7 (fol. 6).