Object data
reed pen and brown ink, with greyish brown wash, on paper toned with light brown wash
height 94 mm × width 52 mm
Willem Drost (attributed to)
Standing Boy
Amsterdam, c. 1650 - c. 1655
Inscriptions
-
inscribed on verso: lower left, in pencil (with the 1906 Hofstede de Groot no.), 1290
-
stamped on verso: centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)
Technical notes
Watermark: None
Condition
Stains, creases and a tear at lower left
Provenance
…; purchased from the dealer Charles Fairfax Murray (1849-1919), London, as Rembrandt, with three other drawings, by Dr Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930), The Hague, 1902;1 by whom donated to the museum, 1906, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum (L. 2228), 1930
Object number: RP-T-1930-44
Credit line: Gift of Dr C. Hofstede de Groot, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Willem Drost (Amsterdam 1633 - Venice 1659)
He was baptized in the Nieuwe Kerk, Amsterdam, on 19 April 1633.2 Houbraken mentions that he was a pupil of Rembrandt and that he worked in Rome for a long time.3 Before he entered Rembrandt’s workshop, probably at the end of the 1640s, he may have studied under Rembrandt’s pupil Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678) in the mid-1640s. After Drost left Amsterdam for Italy, where he is documented in Venice from 1655, he abandoned his Rembrandtesque manner and adopted the powerful chiaroscuro style of the Venetian tenebrists. He may have worked only briefly in Rome, but was mostly active in Venice, where he trained Johann Carl Loth (1632–1698), among others, and he is now known to have died there from pneumonia in 1659, at the age of only 25.4 The rediscovery of his burial record in Venice on 25 February 1659 means that many painted works with later dates traditionally ascribed to him have recently been removed from his oeuvre. On the basis of his choice of subject and style, the majority of his drawings seem to have originated during his apprenticeship in Amsterdam under Rembrandt.
Entry
From the four drawings of standing men in oriental costume in the museum’s holdings that have been tentatively attributed to Drost by Schatborn (see also inv. nos. RP-T-1930-43, RP-T-1930-42 and RP-T-1930-35),5 the present sheet is of the lowest quality. The figure is sketched with a very coarse reed pen, and consequently the lines are too thick and hardly suggest form. The artist also had difficulty in rendering details, such as the hands and the rather superficially drawn face of the boy.
Another version of the same boy, with his head in a slightly different position, can be found in a drawing of a Standing Man and a Boy in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 5786), now assigned to the Rembrandt School.6 Perhaps both drawings are copied from another source.
Marleen Ram, 2018
Literature
Tentoonstelling van teekeningen van Oude Hollandsche meesters uit de verzameling van Dr. Corn. Hofstede de Groot, exh. cat. The Hague (Haagsche Kunstkring) 1902-03, no. 41 (as Rembrandt); Tentoonstelling van teekeningen van Oud-Nederlandsche meesters, exh. cat. Leiden (Vereeniging die Laecken-Halle) 1903, no. 18 (as Rembrandt); C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1290 (as Rembrandt); W.R. Valentiner, Nicolaes Maes, Stuttgart/Berlin/Leipzig 1924, p. 52 (as Nicolaes Maes); M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1942, no. 8 (as Nicolaes Maes), with additional earlier literature; W. Sumowski, Bemerkungen zu Otto Beneschs “Corpus der Rembrandt-Zeichnungen” II, Bad Pyrmont 1961, p. 20, under no. 1085 (as Nicolaes Maes); W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, 10 vols., New York 1979-92, VIII (1984), no. 1974* (as Nicolaes Maes), with additional earlier literature; P. Schatborn, ‘Tekeningen van Rembrandts leerlingen’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 33 (1985), no. 2, pp. 103, 108, n. 50; W.W. Robinson, ‘Rembrandt’s Sketches of Historical Subjects’, in W. Strauss and T. Felker (eds.), Drawings Defined, New York 1987, p. 257, n. 25 (as not by Nicolaes Maes); H. Bevers, P. Schatborn and B. Welzel, Rembrandt, the Master and his Workshop: Drawings and Etchings, exh. cat. Berlin (Kupferstichkabinett) and elsewhere 1991-92, p. 142, under no. 45, n. 3; W.W. Robinson, Maes’s Drawings and his Practice as a Draftsman, Cambridge (MA) 1996 (PhD diss., Harvard University), p. 98, n. 7; D.A. de Witt, L. van Sloten and J. van der Veen, Rembrandt’s Late Pupils: Studying under a Genius, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2015, p. 126, no. 87 (c. 1650-53); H. Bevers, with a contribution by G.J. Dietz and A. Penz, Zeichnungen der Rembrandtschule im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, coll. cat. Berlin 2018, pp. 271-72, under no. 146
Citation
M. Ram, 2018, 'attributed to Willem Drost, Standing Boy, Amsterdam, c. 1650 - c. 1655', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.36085
(accessed 27 November 2024 07:37:25).