Young Man Holding a Rearing Horse by its Bridle, Frightened by a Barking Dog

Haarlem, before c. 1646

Object data

black chalk, with grey wash; framing line in black ink

height 111 mm × width 159 mm

Inscriptions

monogrammed: lower left, in black chalk, PHW (in ligature)
inscribed on verso: upper centre, in an old hand, in brown ink (trimmed), illegible; lower left, in pencil, […]2[...]; lower centre, in pencil, Ph. Wouwerman
stamped on verso: lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

watermark: none

Condition

Some foxing

Provenance

…; ? sale, Gerrit Braamcamp (1699-1771, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (Jan de Bosch et al.), 29 February 1768, Album A, no. 3 (‘Een steigerend Paard ’t welke by ’t Bidt vast gehouden word door een Man staande by een Boom, en agter dezelve een Blaffende Hond, geteekend in de manier als de voorgaande [met zwart Kryt en Oostindise Inkt gewassen], door Ph. Wouwerman’);¹ …; sale, Hendrik van Cranenburgh (1754-1832, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (Roos et al.), 26 October 1858 sqq., Album E, no. 100 (‘Philip Wouwerman. Un palfrenier tenant par la bride un cheval qui se cabre, agacé par les aboyements d’un chien; lavé à l’encre de chine’), fl. 95, to the dealer F. Buffa, Amsterdam;² …; sale, C.C. Huysmans and A.J. van Wijngaerdt, Amsterdam (F. Muller & Co), 21 June 1887 sqq., no. 254 (‘Philippe Wouwerman. Garçon conduisant un cheval à la laisse. Beau dessin, parfaitement authentique et signé. Cabinet Cranenburg. -H. 11.3, L. 16 cent.’), fl. 71, to William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2643); his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25 June 1895 sqq., no. 753, fl. 80, to the dealer F. Muller for the Vereniging Rembrandt;³ from whom, fl. 92, to the museum (L. 2228), 1902
…; ? sale, Gerrit Braamcamp (1699-1771, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (Jan de Bosch et al.), 29 February 1768, Album A, no. 3 (‘Een steigerend Paard ’t welke by ’t Bidt vast gehouden word door een Man staande by een Boom, en agter dezelve een Blaffende Hond, geteekend in de manier als de voorgaande [met zwart Kryt en Oostindise Inkt gewassen], door Ph. Wouwerman’);⁴ …; sale, Hendrik van Cranenburgh (1754-1832, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (Roos et al.), 26 October 1858 sqq., Album E, no. 100 (‘Philip Wouwerman. Un palfrenier tenant par la bride un cheval qui se cabre, agacé par les aboyements d’un chien; lavé à l’encre de chine’), fl. 95, to the dealer F. Buffa, Amsterdam;⁵ …; sale, C.C. Huysmans and A.J. van Wijngaerdt, Amsterdam (F. Muller & Co), 21 June 1887 sqq., no. 254 (‘Philippe Wouwerman. Garçon conduisant un cheval à la laisse. Beau dessin, parfaitement authentique et signé. Cabinet Cranenburg. -H. 11.3, L. 16 cent.’), fl. 71, to William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2643); his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25 June 1895 sqq., no. 753, fl. 80, to the dealer F. Muller for the Vereniging Rembrandt;⁶ from whom, fl. 92, to the museum (L. 2228), 1902

Object number: RP-T-1902-A-4649

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Philips Wouwerman (Haarlem 1619 - Haarlem 1668)

He was born as the eldest son of the Reformed history painter Pouwels Joostensz Wouwermans (c. 1580/85-1642) and his fourth wife, Susanna van den Bogert (1591-in or after 1644), and was baptized in Haarlem on 24 May 1619.⁷ His grandfather, Joost Philipsz Wouwerman (?-?), had emigrated from Flanders to Haarlem around 1580. It seems likely that Philips was initially trained by his father, who was called a painter of moderate kind (‘van geringe sort’) by Houbraken.⁸ According to De Bie, Philips was an apprentice of Frans Hals (1582/83-1666),⁹ although their work has nothing in common. An apprenticeship with Pieter Cornelisz Verbeeck (c. 1600-1654) is suspected on stylistic grounds.

In 1638, Wouwerman travelled to Hamburg at the age of nineteen, against the will of his parents, to marry the Catholic girl Anna Pietersdr van Broeckhof (?-1670), and there he apparently worked with the now unknown local history painter Evert Decker (?-1647).¹⁰ By 1640 at the latest, Philips had returned to Haarlem, because he entered the Guild of St Luke on 4 September of that year and was elected to the office of warden in 1646. Between 1642 and 1655 he served in the Old or St George civic guard.

Apart from his journey to Hamburg, it seems that Wouwerman never travelled South, as was suggested by some.¹¹ The influence of the Haarlem artist Pieter van Laer (1599-1642), who had returned from Rome in 1639, is evident in Wouwerman’s early works of around 1640. Although Houbraken reports that Wouwerman got hold of Van Laer’s drawings after the latter’s death in 1642 after a dispute between the two artists and that Wouwerman burned these (or his own drawings) on his deathbed some decades later,¹² this anecdote must be doubted. Nevertheless, Van Laer’s influence on Wouwerman’s work is evident.

Wouwerman’s earliest dated picture is a Military Encampment with Soldiers Gambling of 1639 in a private collection ¹³ Wouwerman is mainly known as a successful painter of equine subjects and depictions of horses in battles, hunts, riding schools, stables, forges and encampments, of which many have a genre-like character. He also produced some rural scenes, winter landscapes, marines, dune and beach landscapes. Wouwerman made several history pieces with religious subjects for Catholic patrons. His known oeuvre is very large. In his catalogue raisonné of 1908, Hofstede de Groot included over a thousand paintings, while Schumacher in her monograph of 2006 lists almost six hundred paintings. The few surviving drawings by his hand are usually considered independent works for the art market and lack a connection to known paintings.¹⁴ Despite the large output, Wouwerman maintained a stable level of quality throughout his oeuvre, but unfortunately only a fraction of his paintings is dated.

Philips’s two younger brothers, Pieter Wouwerman (1623-1682) and Jan Wouwerman (1629-1666), were also trained as painters¹⁵, and they were probably both at some point working in Philips’s workshop. Throughout his career, Wouwerman had several pupils. He paid, for example, for the apprenticeship of the now unknown artists Nicolaes Ficke (c. 1620-1702), Jacob Warnars (?-?) from Amsterdam and Kort Witholt (?-?) from Sweden in 1642, followed by Matthias Scheitz (c. 1625/30-c. 1700) from Hamburg in the late 1640s, Jan Verney (?-?) in 1653, and Antony de Haen (1640-in or before 1675?) and Hendrick Berckman (1629-1679) in 1656.

Wouwerman remained productive to the end of his life, with his last dated work, Grey Horse Standing in a Stable in a private collection (on loan to the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem),¹⁶ being executed in the year of his death. Wouwerman died on 19 May 1668 at the age of forty-two and was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem on the 23 May 1668.¹⁷ His wife died two years later, leaving behind three adult daughters and three sons and a daughter, who were still minors. The sums of money mentioned in the deed dividing the estate among the children of 12 October 1670 indicate that the family must have lived in prosperity.¹⁸ Their daughter Ledewina (1644/45-in or before 1678) married Henri de Fromantiou (1633/34-1693/1705), court painter of the Elector of Brandenburg, on 25 September 1672. Although Houbraken stated that she received a dowry of 20,000 guilders¹⁹, no archival evidence supports this and it seems unlikely, because the marriage took place four years after her father’s death. Wouwerman supplemented his income by speculating on the property market and dealing in art. However, there are also indications that he suffered bouts of poverty. For example, he is said to have painted his Conversion of St Hubert (1660), now in the collection of Lord Penrhyn at Penrhyn Castle, for the clandestine Sint-Bernarduskerk in Haarlem as thanks for the financial support he had received from the parish priest.²⁰

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Wouwerman’s works were very sought after by aristocratic collectors, for example in St Petersburg, Dresden, The Hague and France, and fetched some of the highest prices for paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. This also motivated a lot of imitators, among them, for example, Pieter van Bredael (1629-1719) and his grandsons Jan Frans van Bredael (1686-1750) and Joseph van Bredael (1688-1739), Carel van Falens (1683-1733), Conrelis Vermeulen (1732-1813) and his son Andries Vermeulen (1763-1814) are known by name. Also, between the late 1650s or early 1660s and 1800, altogether some three hundred reproductive prints were made after Wouwerman’s paintings.²¹ The extensive trade and circulation of prints of his work led to the widespread production of drawn copies after his paintings. Those drawings directly related to his paintings, especially figure and compositional studies in red chalk, are now thought to be copies.²² His authentic drawings – often monogrammed and almost always executed in black chalk and grey wash – mirror the subject-matter of his paintings, but there is rarely, if ever, a direct link.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2019/Milou Goverde, 2020

References
T. Schrevelius, Harlemias, ofte, om beter te seggen. De eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem, Haarlem 1648, p. 384; C. de Bie, Het gulden cabinet vande edele vry schilder-const, Antwerp 1661-62, pp. 281-82, 414; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, II (1719), pp. 70-75; A. van der Willigen, Les Artistes de Harlem: Notices historiques avec un précis sur la Gilde de St. Luc, Haarlem/The Hague 1870, pp. 336-40; F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis, 7 vols., Rotterdam 1877-90, VII (1890), pp. 118-26; A. Lichtwark, Matthias Scheits, als Schilderer des Hamburger Lebens, 1650-1700, Hamburg 1899, pp. 43-44; C. Hofstede de Groot (ed.), Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragenden holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 10 vols., Esslingen 1907-28, II (1908), pp. 247-659; U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXXIV (1947), pp. 265-68; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1789, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, I, p. 260, 392; II, pp. 488, 491-92, 508-09, 514, 519, 535, 543, 546, 549, 613-14, 673, 934, 1031-32, 1039, 1041, 1060; F.J. Duparc, ‘Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668)’, Oud Holland 107 (1993), no. 3, pp. 257-86; B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, 2 vols., Doornspijk 2006 (Aetas aurea: Monographs on Dutch and Flemish Painting, vol. 20); P. Biesboer and N. Köhler (eds.), Painting in Haarlem, 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 355-63 (entry van I. van Thiel-Stroman); F. Duparc and Q. Buvelot (eds.), Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668), exh. cat. Kassel (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel)/The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2009-10; Q. Buvelot and S. Alsteens, ‘A Rediscovered Drawing by Philips Wouwerman’, Master Drawings 51 (2013), no. 4, pp. 445-50; A. Stefes, ‘Did Philips Wouwerman Draw with Red Chalk?’, Master Drawings 57 (2019), no. 4, pp. 453-72

Entry

Scholars have often commented on how few drawings by Philips Wouwerman have survived, especially given his exceptionally large painted oeuvre. This has nourished the rumour recorded by the biographer Arnold Houbraken (1660-1719) that the artist decided to burn his preparatory drawings just before his death.²³ after his death’). A few sentences further, however, Houbraken stated that it was the drawings of others that Wouwerman actually burned. See also V. Röver, Catalogus. Boeken, schilderijen, tekeningen, printen, beelden, rariteiten, s.l., 1730, Amsterdam University Library, inv. no. HS II A 18, p. 125, Album N, no. 23; and B.P.J. Broos and M. Schapelhouman, Nederlandse tekenaars geboren tussen 1600 en 1660, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1993 (Oude tekeningen in het bezit van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, waaronder de collectie Fodor, vol. 4), p. 229.] Whether or not this anecdote is true is debatable. It seems undermined by the fact that in 1736 more than 200 of Wouwerman’s drawings were auctioned from the collection of Samuel van Huls (1655-1734).²⁴

The drawings now universally accepted as autograph are monogrammed examples such as the present sheet and inv. no. RP-T-1888-A-1541, that is, compositional studies with figures and horses, such as hunting groups, riding schools and army camps, all executed in black chalk, with grey wash. The format of these sheets is predominantly horizontal: in most cases the figures are on the same plan and the background is hardly indicated, if at all. Although the subject-matter coincides with that of the artist’s paintings, there is rarely, if ever, a direct link. Similar examples in this same technique can be found in the Amsterdam Museum (inv. no. TA 10390),²⁵ the Teylers Museum, Haarlem (inv. nos. P+ 032, P+ 031 and P+ 034),²⁶ the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1895,0915.1365),²⁷ and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (inv. no. 2013.144).²⁸ Particularly close in terms of style, technique and subject-matter is the drawing of A Rider about to Mount a Piebald Horse, with a Boy Holding the Bridle in the New York collection of Clement C. Moore II.²⁹

By contrast, the studies of individual figures and figural motifs drawn in red chalk that are directly related to paintings by Wouwerman or reproductive prints after them (e.g. inv. no. RP-T-1951-210) – drawings that were long thought to be authentic works by the artist – are now generally assumed to be copies.³⁰ That such individual figure and animal studies by the artist must once have existed, however, is suggested by the frequent repetition of the same motifs in more than one autograph painting.

Because Wouwerman rarely dated his work, it is not easy to place his drawings chronologically. One of the few points of departure is the fact that from 1646 he expanded his monogram PH.W. (in ligature) in his paintings to PHILS.W (in ligature) or a variant of it.³¹ Assuming that he signed his drawings in the same way, a date in or before the mid-1640s should be considered for the sheet described here.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2000/Jane Shoaf Turner, 2019

Literature

Jaarverslag Rijksprentenkabinet 1902, p. 29

Citation

G. Wuestman, 2000/J. Shoaf Turner, 2019, 'Philips Wouwerman, Young Man Holding a Rearing Horse by its Bridle, Frightened by a Barking Dog, Haarlem, before c. 1646 - 1646', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.63949

(accessed 21 September 2024 19:46:28).