Walking Man in a High Cap

Entry

A man holding his hands and wearing a high cap is walking towards the left. The figure was drawn with a reed pen in a mixture of fine, light lines and dark, broad lines. The face and the cap were fairly precisely indicated, but the rest of the figure was broadly sketched.

The attribution to Rembrandt is problematical, as is its relationship with two paintings, the Adoration of the Magi in the British Royal Collection in Buckingham Palace in London (inv. no. RCIN 405350),³ which is a school work even though it bears a false signature and date, Rembrandt f 1657, and the Return of the Prodigal Son, in The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg (inv. no. GE-742),⁴ which may be by Rembrandt. The style of the study, however, is so typical of the drawings Rembrandt made in the second half of the 1650s, all of which were very broadly sketched in reed pen, that the attribution to him cannot be doubted.⁵ It is exactly these stylistic similarities with a group of later drawings by Rembrandt that rule out Werner Sumowski’s reattribution of Walking Man in a High Cap to Nicolaes Maes, who was Rembrant’s pupil circa 1650.⁶ However, Maes’s broad, sketchy drawing style is based on drawings by Rembrandt in which the forms are not indicated with the short, angular strokes so characteristic of Rembrandt’s later drawings. The relationship between the precisely indicated face and the increasing sketchiness of line as we move towards the bottom of the figure in the present sketch – and especially the manner in which light and dark lines alternate and certain areas have been left unresolved – are all typical traits of Rembrandt’s later drawings.

The connection with the figure on the right in the Prodigal Son in the Hermitage is not sufficiently direct to consider the Walking Man in a High Cap to be a preliminary study; in fact, Rembrandt seldom made preparatory studies of this type. On the other hand, the figure type bears enough resemblance to allow us to speak of a broad relationship. The link between the drawing and the painting raises various questions, however, including how much of the painting, which is the largest work to come out of the studio in the late 1660s, was completed by Rembrandt himself.⁷ If we assume that it was not Rembrandt but a student such as Aert de Gelder who made, or at least finished, the painting, then he could have based the life-size painted figure, which contains details absent in the drawing, on the Walking Man in a High Cap. In any case, De Gelder certainly knew the drawing, since he used it for one of the figures in his painting of The Entombment in the Staatsgalerie in Schloss Johannisburg in Aschaffenburg (inv. no. 6331).⁸

The drawing is probably a section from a sheet of studies, possibly of the same man in different positions. The paper has not been cut straight with respect to the chain and laid lines, causing the man to bend forward a bit too much. If we allow for this, the figure is standing up straight, as in the Hermitage painting.

These types of drawings were made by Rembrandt at various periods of his career, for example, a pair of sheets in the British Museum in London, Three Studies of a Bearded Man on Crutches and a Woman (inv. no. Gg,2.252)⁹ and Three Studies of Old Men Standing and Walking (inv. no. Oo,9.76),¹⁰ and, finally, one in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, the Three Studies of a Beggar (inv. no. KdZ 3108).¹¹

I consider the drawing to be a work of Rembrandt from the second half of the 1650s, which was used by Aert de Gelder for a figure in his painting of The Entombment and perhaps also by him in the Hermitage Prodigal Son.

Peter Schatborn, 2017