View of Zeelst, Noord-Brabant

The Rijksmuseum holds a collection of 119 landscape drawings by three late seventeenth-century draughtsmen, Josua de Grave (1643-1712), Valentijn Klotz (c. 1646-1721) and his relative (possibly a brother or cousin?), midshipman (‘adelborst’) Barend Klotz (?-?). During the Franco-Dutch war (1672-78), the three artists accompanied the army of the Dutch States-General under the Stadholder Prince Willem III of Orange (1650-1702) on several campaigns to Brabant, Limburg, Hainaut and East Flanders, during which they depicted the encampments, landscapes, cities and villages they encountered along the way. The three artists probably drew in situ and share a very similar style. They often depicted the same sites or even directly copied each other’s works. Only a few of these sheets are fully signed. As a result, the attributions of several of the drawings in this group have shifted back and forth between the three artists’ oeuvres.

Among these groups of drawings are eleven sheets that form a coherent subset. They are roughly the same format, c. 95 x 150 mm, and were likely part of one or more small sketchbooks. Seven of the eleven sheets include a number inscribed in the upper right corner, which corresponds to the chronology of their production. The drawings might have been numbered when they were still part of a sketchbook. The drawings record specific sites and include prominent buildings, often placed in the centre of the sheet. The overall scene is always seen from a distance. To create depth, the foreground is decorated with trees, shrubberies, figures or a body of water in the case of inv. nos. RP-T-00-174 and RP-T-1901-A-4549. In several drawings dated in autumn months, the trees bear leaves (e.g. the present sheet, as well as inv. nos. RP-T-1900-A-4441, RP-T-1900-A-4442, RP-T-1898-A-3767 and RP-T-1888-A-1641). Perhaps the artist allowed himself some degree of artistic freedom.

The drawings are carried out in pen and brown ink and finished with grey wash applied in varying degrees of density. Inscriptions appear on all of them and include the location and a date, covering the period between May 1674 to November 1675. The dates are written in the same format: first the word ‘den’ (‘the’), then followed by the day, month and year.

At first glance, the drawings appear to have been made by the same draughtsman, for the handling of the pen and the handwriting reveal very few discrepancies. Stylistically, the drawings come closest to the work of Barend Klotz and Josua de Grave, who used a similar technique to render trees and foliage and who worked in a neater manner than Valentijn Klotz.

When comparing the handwriting on this group of drawings with those of autograph drawings by both artists, it perhaps comes closest to that of Barend Klotz, who used the old-fashioned ‘e’ most consistently and whose handwriting is a little less consistent than De Grave’s, whose penmanship is more elegant and often uses curly (capital) letters. Furthermore, when De Grave added a date to his drawings, he followed a consistently different format: first the year and then the day and month (expressed as a fraction) or a split year with the day and month (expressed as a fraction) at the centre. In this group, by contrast, several variations were used. In several drawings by Barend Klotz (e.g. inv. nos. RP-T-1899-A-4281 and RP-T-1913-50), he added the word ‘drawn’ (gete(e)kent) before the date, a feature that can also be found on one drawing in this ‘numbered sketchbook’ group (inv. no. RP-T-1888-A-1612).¹

Assuming the artists worked alongside each other, it is all together possible that their drawings ended up on one large pile and were brought back to their studio. If this were indeed the case, the inscriptions could well have been added at a later point and not necessarily by the artist who made the drawing. This would explain why the inscriptions vary slightly in style and format.

Carolyn Mensing, 2021