Three Orientals Conversing

Entry

Two exotically dressed men are standing and talking to each other. One extends his arm while speaking, the other listens. On the right is the upper part of a third man, who holds his hands behind his back and looks on with a smile.

Rembrandt was always interested in foreign types, especially what are now generically termed ‘orientals’. For him, they probably represented the characters from biblical stories. He was, of course, especially interested in their facial types and their exotic clothing, which he wanted to exploit in order to depict history scenes in his etchings and paintings as authentically as possible. Drawings of these types formed part of his wide-ranging encyclopaedic art collection, in which all sorts of exotica had a place. This is why, for example, he also copied Mughal paintings (inv. nos. RP-T-1961-82, RP-T-1930-41, RP-T-1961-83 and RP-T-1897-A-3203). Unlike the Mughal copies, always drawn in their entirety, these sketches do not seem to have been based on a model or prototype by another artist. It is quite likely that Rembrandt saw and portrayed Middle Eastern, Eastern European or Asian figures that he saw first hand in Amsterdam, which was, after all, an international trading city. The three figures in Three Orientals Conversing were probably recorded spontaneously by the artist, and the man on the right was not completed, possibly because the opportunity had passed. Rembrandt probably used a reed pen, moving quickly and easily across the paper, thereby achieving a lively variety of broad and finely hatched lines.

The drawing has a long and chequered attribution history: among the names suggested in the past as its author are Ferdinand Bol,³ Aert de Gelder⁴ and Lambert Doomer.⁵. The attributions to Bol and De Gelder are no longer accepted, but that to Doomer was firmly maintained by Werner Sumowski, who included it as the first drawing in his ‘authentic’ category in the Drawings of the Rembrandt School (1979). This is because similar figures appear in the background of a painting by that artist, Moses and Thermutis, in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.⁶ Furthermore, the figure on the left appears in a somewhat altered form in a drawing by Doomer of Eliezar and Rebecca at the Well, formerly in the collection of Alice and John Steiner in New York, and now in The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (inv. no. 2005.418.6).⁷ The Amsterdam drawing is not a preliminary study by Doomer for his painting, however, but was only used by him as a model for both works. Many authors consider Doomer to have been a pupil of Rembrandt in the early 1640s;⁸ it has also been suggested that Rembrandt’s influence can be explained by the fact that Doomer obtained a considerable collection of drawings and prints by Rembrandt after the auction of his works on paper in 1658.⁹ He made copies of Rembrandt’s drawings and could, of course, have incorporated motifs from them into his own works. This conclusion is even more likely since stylistically the drawings from which Doomer derived such motifs bear little resemblance to his own drawings.

Another example of such borrowing is Doomer’s View of the Dam, in the Van Eeghen Collection in the Stadsarchief in Amsterdam (inv. no. 010055000015).¹⁰ Here he took at least three of the four standing figures from other drawings: the gesture of the figure with an outstretched arm at the far right was derived from our drawing; the figure on the left, under the portico, comes from a Rembrandtesque drawing of an Standing Man with Hat, in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam (inv. no. R 30 (PK));¹¹ and the turbaned figure on the far right was inspired by a drawing of Two Orientals from Rembrandt’s studio, in the Louvre in Paris (inv. no. RF 29039),¹² which, in turn, seems to have been inspired by a print by Gillis van Scheyndel (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1879-A-3437).¹³

Aside from the lack of a stylistic relationship with Doomer’s own distinctive work – and there are hardly any comparable drawings of figures in his oeuvre – there are such striking similarities in our drawing to a group of drawings by Rembrandt from the 1640s that an attribution to him becomes the only viable option. This group includes two drawings in the British Museum in London, the Star of the Kings (inv. no. 1910,0212.189),¹⁴ which is signed, and the Three Studies of Old Men, Standing and Walking, which is attributed to him (inv. no. Oo,9.76).¹⁵

The Amsterdam sheet shares many stylistic elements with these other sheets by Rembrandt, not only in the details but also in the relationship of the parts to the whole. The handling of line is very free and easy, verging almost on the sloppy, and yet he managed to portray the figures in a broad, but typically suggestive manner. Here, too, for instance, we also see the telling precision with which Rembrandt always drew faces. The confidence of the experienced draughtsman led him to work rather broadly, which is why certain parts seem to have been set down rather nonchalantly. When Doomer, in his own, original drawings, tried to imitate Rembrandt’s masterful virtuosity,¹⁶ the result was a busy network of lines in which individual elements of Rembrandt’s style are discernible, but they have a different relationship to the forms and above all to one another than in Rembrandt’s work.

After having been incorrectly attributed to Bol, De Gelder and Doomer, the drawing is now once again restored to Rembrandt’s oeuvre, as Benesch always believed to be correct. A date in the mid-1640s would seem to be the most probable.

Peter Schatborn, 2017