Object data
black chalk, with white chalk; framing lines in black ink over brown ink
height 153 mm × width 103 mm
Rembrandt van Rijn
Four Men Standing, Wearing Hats
Amsterdam, c. 1650
Inscriptions
Technical notes
Watermark: None
Condition
Folds, upper right
Provenance
...; ? collection Jan Pietersz Zomer (1641-1724), Amsterdam;1 ...; collection Lambert ten Kate (1674-1731), Amsterdam;2 his sale, Amsterdam (I. Tirion), 16 June 1732 sqq., Album Q, no. 38 (‘Een Soldaetje bij 3 Smousen, met zwart kryt, door Rembrandt’); ...; unknown collection (L. 474); ...; anonymous sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller & Co.), 19 January 1904, no. 295, fl. 350, to the dealer Van Gelder, Amsterdam, for Dr Cornelis Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930), The Hague;3 by whom donated to the museum, 1906, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum (L. 2228), 1930
Object number: RP-T-1930-55
Credit line: Gift of C. Hofstede de Groot, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Leiden 1606 - Amsterdam 1669)
After attending Latin school in his native Leiden, Rembrandt, the son of a miller, enrolled at Leiden University in 1620, but soon abandoned his studies to become an artist. He first trained (1621-23) under the Leiden painter Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburg (c. 1571-1638), followed by six months with the Amsterdam history painter Pieter Lastman (c. 1583-1633). Returning to Leiden around 1624, he shared a studio with Jan Lievens, where he aimed to establish himself as a history painter, winning the admiration of the poet and courtier Constantijn Huygens. In 1628 Gerard Dou (1613-75) became his first pupil. In the autumn of 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where his career rapidly took off. Three years later he joined the Guild of St Luke and married Saskia Uylenburgh (1612-42), niece of the art dealer Hendrik Uylenburgh (c. 1587-1661), in whose house he had been living and working. She died shortly after giving birth to their son Titus, by which time Rembrandt was already in financial straits owing to excessive spending on paintings, prints, antiquities and studio props for his history pieces. After Saskia’s death, Rembrandt lived first with Titus's wet nurse, Geertje Dircx (who eventually sued Rembrandt for breach of promise and was later imprisoned for her increasingly unstable behaviour), and then with his later housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels (by whom he had a daughter, Cornelia). Mounting debts made him unable to meet the payments of his house on the Jodenbreestraat and forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656 and to sell his house and art collection. In the last decade of his life, he, Hendrickje and Titus resided in more modest accommodation on the Rozengracht, but Rembrandt continued to be dogged by continuing financial difficulties. His beloved Titus died in 1668. Rembrandt survived him by only a year and was buried in the Westerkerk.
Entry
Four men are conversing with one another. Three of them wear long coats and one has a short jacket and boots. The description in the auction catalogue of the Ten Kate collection in 1732 calls the latter a soldier and the other three ‘Smousen’ (Jews).
The drawing has been sketched quickly in black chalk, and it reveals a number of typical characteristics of Rembrandt’s style: the angular feet and hand (in the middle), the omission of the feet of the man on the right, and the tiny dots used for the eyes in the subtly drawn faces, which despite the small format have character and individuality. The chalk is somewhat rubbed and the white heightening can now be seen only under a raking light. In the past, this faint impression led to the drawing being considered either a counterproof (i.e. an offset impression from a drawing pressed onto another piece of paper) or a copy.4 It was thus excluded from Benesch’s corpus of Rembrandt’s drawings. Judging by the direction of the hatching from lower left to upper right (i.e. right-handed), the drawing is not an offset. It likewise does not appear to be a copy, especially compared to a second example of the same composition, in Musée Bonnat-Helleu in Bayonne (inv. no. NI1462), which in all respects, especially in the ineffectual facial expressions, must surely be deemed a copy of the present sheet. It is thus difficult to understand why our drawing has not been accepted as an original: but a doubt once expressed sometimes leads a stubborn life of its own.
There is a rather large group of black chalk figure drawings of this type, some of which, like the present example, were sketched on very thin paper. One of these, in the Amsterdam Museum (inv. no. TA 10268),5 has a portrait sketch of Jan Six on the verso, made as a study for the etching of 1647 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1961-1160).6 This link provides an important clue to dating the whole group. A second drawing in the same museum, Four Men Talking (inv. no. TA 10276),7 has been connected with the 1652 etching of Christ among the Doctors (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1962-34),8 but our drawing more likely belongs to the group from around 1647. In the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin, there are two further drawings, long overlooked in the literature, that have been added with others to the same group,9 one of which is now accepted as an original drawing by Rembrandt,10 while the other is now regarded as a copy.11
There is a large group of similar black chalk drawings in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung in Munich, but these are considered later forgeries. A few of these were drawn on thin paper, but the structure of this paper is somewhat different.12 The forger, who made most of the so-called Rembrandt drawings in Munich, must have known the original group of sketches in black chalk. This is also evident from a pen drawing with a head (inv. no. 1541)13 that was clearly derived from the sketch of Jan Six on the verso of the Amsterdam sheet.
A few sketches by Rembrandt, including our Four Standing Men (and other drawings, such as our Winter View, inv. no. RP-T-1930-63), bear an inscription in ink with his name, probably written by the collector Lambert ten Kate.14 The Winter View also carries the collector’s mark of J.P. Zomer, so it must have been in his collection. Although the black chalk drawings do not bear Zomer’s mark, they, too, could have come from his collection, specifically his album no. 38, which lists the same subjects as found in the Ten Kate auction catalogue and also uses some of the same descriptions.15 In Zomer’s catalogue of circa 1722, the following description can be found: ‘A book oblong, no. 38, with gold stripes, bound in horn, with many attractive pictures of Jews and Jewesses, Persians, beggars and other street figures’.16 In Ten Kate’s catalogue, Portfolio Q, item no. 38 – which must refer specifically to the present sheet – is described as follows: ‘A soldier with three Jews, drawn in black chalk’. Other drawings of ‘beggars, beggar women, vagrants, Jews’ and an ‘Armenian’ are also mentioned in the collection.17
Peter Schatborn, 2017
Literature
C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1301; M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. The Hague 1942, no. 88 (as copy); P. Schatborn, Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, IV: Tekeningen van Rembrandt, zijn onbekende leerlingen en navolgers/Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, coll. cat. The Hague 1985, no. 28, with earlier literature; M. Royalton-Kisch, Drawings by Rembrandt and his Circle in the British Museum, exh. cat. London 1992, p. 161, under no. 74; W.W. Robinson, ‘Five Black Chalk Figure Studies by Rembrandt’, Master Drawings 36 (1998), no. 1, pp. 36-37 from pp. 36-45, fig. 1; W.W. Robinson, ‘A Black Chalk Drawing by Rembrandt’, in A. Gnann and H. Widauer (eds.), Festschrift für Konrad Oberhuber, Milan 2000, p. 303 from pp. 303-06; M. Schapelhouman, Rembrandt and the Art of Drawing, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 52, 54, 56, fig. 49; L. Sigal-Klagsbald et al. (eds.), Rembrandt et la Nouvelle Jérusalem: Juifs et Chrétiens à Amsterdam au siècle d’or, exh. cat. Paris (Musée d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaïsme) 2007, pp. 244-45, under no. 118, fig. 2; J. Shoaf Turner, Rembrandt’s World: Dutch Drawings from the Clement C. Moore Collection, exh. cat. New York (The Morgan Library & Museum) 2012, pp. 76 and 82, under nos. 30 and 32, fig. 1; P. Schatborn and L. van Sloten, Old Drawings, New Names: Rembrandt and his Contemporaries, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2014, no. 35; H. Bevers, with a contribution by G.J. Dietz and A. Penz, Zeichnungen der Rembrandtschule im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, coll. cat. Berlin 2018, p. 270, under no. 143.
Citation
P. Schatborn, 2017, 'Rembrandt van Rijn, Four Men Standing, Wearing Hats, Amsterdam, c. 1650', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.28546
(accessed 23 September 2024 08:38:05).