Swooning Woman Supported by Two Figures

Entry

This touching drawing shows a woman who appears to have suffered from intense grief or pain. Judging from her limp body lying on the ground, from the care with which an old man behind her and a young woman on the left are propping up her torso, and from her closed eyes, she is unconscious or at least unaware of her surroundings. The three figures are delineated with virtuoso, quick pen lines, ranging from bold contours to spirited squiggles for the shaded areas, especially in the unconscious woman’s left sleeve and chest, and in the face and neck of the man. The woman on the left is sketched more rudimentarily, with sharp lines for her features and cleverly placed, single pen strokes suggesting the shape of her feet. Pentimenti in the reclined woman’s feet indicate that her legs were reduced in size. Some corrections were also applied with opaque white watercolour in the woman’s chest and face.

As is the case with most drawings by Ferdinand Bol, this one too was long considered to be by Rembrandt. Although Benesch saw hints of Bol’s draughtsmanship in 1935, the high quality of the drawing made him reluctant to suggest a full-blown attribution to the master’s student.⁴ It was not until 1979 that Werner Sumowski added the drawing to Bol’s oeuvre. Typical for Bol are the eyes of the woman on the left, consisting of a little stroke and a circle, and the energetic, sometimes gratuitous pen lines, such as the horizontal strokes in the woman’s lap that fail to convey much volume. The drawing can be compared with the Woman Kneeling before a Man in the Rijksmuseum from circa 1640 (inv. no. RP-T-1930-14), especially in the general bold energy of the draughtsmanship and the dense, horizontal squiggles for the shaded passages in the sleeves. As Sumowski noted, there are also stylistic correspondences with The Messenger of God Appearing to Joshua (inv. no. RP-T-1930-7), especially in the sharp delineation of the features of the figures in three-quarter profile at left in both drawings. The present work presumably originated around 1640, at the end of Bol’s apprenticeship with Rembrandt, when he had attained his own, bold style that was still heavily influenced by the master.

The drawing’s subject-matter bears a long history of identification. Early writers Hofstede de Groot (1906) and Fritz Saxl (1908) catalogued it as a study for the Virgin Mary in a Lamentation or Passion Scene. Valentiner (1923) and Benesch (1935) interpreted it as a scene of a woman in labour, and Weisbach (1926) even went so far as to call it a depiction of Saskia in childbirth. In his 1942 catalogue of drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, Henkel returned to the suggestion that it represents a study for the Virgin, this time at the base of the Cross. He pointed to the similarities between this figure group and that of the Virgin supported by a young woman and an old man on the right in Rembrandt’s etching from the mid-1630s, the Crucifixion: Small Plate (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-OB-319).⁵ The figures in the drawing also correspond to those of the Virgin with the dead Christ in her lap supported by bystanders in Rembrandt’s grisaille Lamentation over the Dead Christ from about 1635 in the National Gallery, London (inv. no. 43).⁶ Bol knew this composition well, for he drew a copy of it during his time in Rembrandt’s workshop.⁷ He may, in fact, have looked at it directly while working on the present drawing, for the position of the Virgin's feet in Rembrandt’s painting and Bol’s copy corresponds exactly to that of the corrected feet in the present drawing.⁸

A third interpretation was introduced by Sumowski in 1979. Based on Henkel’s observation that the drawing was used for a Rembrandt School painting of the Death of Lucretia in the Detroit Institute of Arts (inv. no. 89.44),⁹ Sumowski identified the scene as such. Lucretia, the tragic heroine from Livy’s History of Rome (1:57-59), used her dagger to commit suicide in order to preserve her virtue after being raped by Prince Sextus Tarquinius. Her father and husband rushed to her side, but were too late to save her. In the Detroit painting, which was once attributed to Jan Victors (1610-1676) and is dated to the mid-1640s, the poses of Lucretia and her old father are indeed near mirror images of our drawing, and that of her husband is close to that of the woman on the left in the Rijksmuseum sheet.¹⁰ Since Bol probably executed the drawing some years before his unknown colleague made his painting, the subject-matter of the Detroit painting need not necessarily reflect that of our drawing.¹¹ More importantly, the absence of a dagger in the Amsterdam drawing and the presence of a man and a woman, rather than two men, make it difficult to maintain Sumowski’s identification.

In all likelihood, Bol created the present drawing as a compositional study loosely based on Rembrandt’s magnificent examples of the Virgin mourning the loss of her son, but without necessarily intending any particular subject-matter. Around the same time, he incorporated the figure group with some alterations in a larger drawing, the subject of which remains unidentified.¹² The function and use of the drawing are thus similar to the Rijksmuseum study of a Kneeling Woman before a Man (inv. no. RP-T-1930-14), which Bol also reused in another, more elaborate drawing.

Ilona van Tuinen, 2018