Waterfall in the Chartreuse Mountains

Entry

This impressive view of a waterfall is located in the Chartreuse Mountains, a mountain massif north of Grenoble, as is stated by the inscription of the topographical collector Laurens van der Hem. The present sheet must have been part of his collection and was probably made on his commission.² The drawing is not dated but was done on Dutch paper. Other comparable large views by De Moucheron of the region, such as View of the Isère Valley near Grenoble in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (inv. no. RSA 83), were drawn on French paper with a watermark of circa 1654.³ That may point to a later date for the present drawing, especially since it differs stylistically from one of his few dated drawings from that series, the Landscape near the Grand Chartreuse of 1656 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (inv. no. 22204).⁴ Moreover, since it is stylistically related to De Moucheron’s Roman Castle of Francheville), dated 1669, in the famous Atlas of Laurens van der Hem in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (vol. 1, no. 4:29, fol. 65-66), it may have been drawn more than ten years after the artist’s return from France.⁵ A similar signature, with the artist’s name likewise spelled ‘Frederico’, is found on an undated drawing in the Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris, the Bridge at Chaponost (inv. no. 9334).⁶

Not all of the drawings commissioned by Van der Hem made it into his 50-volume atlas now in Vienna. That atlas – an expanded version of the ‘Great Atlas’ (‘Atlas Maior’) by Joan Blaeu (Amsterdam 1660/63) – was assembled by Van der Hem between 1662 and 1678, with drawings and maps of his own choice. The section on France is illustrated by eight large drawings by De Moucheron. Curiously, however, none of these depicts the Chartreuse region.⁷ On the other hand, an album of thirty-two drawings by De Moucheron of that region is described in the auctions of Hendrik van der Vught (1745) and Hendrik Tersmitten (1754), respectively.⁸ Today, these drawings, including most probably the present sheet, are dispersed.⁹ As many of these sheets also bear annotations by Van der Hem, it is assumed that the whole group was once in his collection.¹⁰ Why Van der Hem did not include some such sheets in his atlas is unknown, especially since in the seventeenth century the Chartreuse mountains was particularly popular with travellers.

Annemarie Stefes, 2019