Object data
pen and brown ink on paper toned with a light brown wash; framing line in brown ink
height 135 mm × width 118 mm
Rembrandt van Rijn
Woman with Urinating Child and a Horse’s Head
Amsterdam, c. 1658 - c. 1660
Inscriptions
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inscribed: lower right, in brown ink, 48
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inscribed on verso: upper left, in pencil, 8.0
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stamped on verso: centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)
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inscribed on mount: lower left, in brown ink, Rembrand
Technical notes
Watermark: None visible through lining
Condition
Laid down; light foxing throughout
Provenance
...; from the dealer O. Wertheimer, Paris, fl. 550, to the museum (L. 2228), 1955
Object number: RP-T-1955-48
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
A woman is bending forward and holding up the jacket of a little boy who is urinating. Both the woman and the child are looking directly at the viewer. To the left of these figures and completely unrelated to them is a horse’s head. There is a second, related drawing in the Kupferstich-Kabinett in Dresden (inv. no. C 1896-34),1 which was probably made at the same time and which may originally have been part of the same sheet.
The subject matter is not unusual in the visual arts. Rembrandt had depicted a urinating child in his painting of the Rape of Ganymede, dated 1635, in the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister in Dresden (inv. no. 1558),2 an allusion to Ganymede as Aquarius, the water-bearer.3 He also owned A Pissing Child,4 a kind of Manneken Pis, the nickname given to a famous small bronze statue by Hieronymus Duquesnoy the elder of a naked boy urinating in a fountain in Brussels, which thus literally functioned as a water-bearer. The urinating child in our drawing was not based on this well-known statue, since his hands are free. Rembrandt probably witnessed this scene first hand and set it down in the two sketches in Amsterdam and Dresden. When a seventeenth-century artist saw such a vignette, he would probably immediately associate it with the symbolic meaning that such scenes had in literature and the visual arts.
There is an earlier drawing of a woman with a child frightened by a dog, in the Frits Lugt Collection in the Fondation Custodia in Paris (inv. no. 5155),5 which Rembrandt probably sketched immediately after seeing the incident. Then, in a sheet in the Museum of Fine Arts in Budapest (inv. no. 1589),6 he made a more detailed drawing in a somewhat altered form in which the minor episode recorded in the first-hand Lugt sketch is elevated to the main subject incorporated within a broader formal setting. Such glimpses from quotidien life could attract the artist’s attention because the scene already had some allegorical significance for him or because such a scene could be transformed in such a way as to have symbolic meaning. By the same token, Rembrandt’s drawings of the daily life of women and children also served as models for his students. His pupil Nicolaes Maes was especially fond of drawing and painting these subjects.
The present sketch was drawn with a broad reed pen on light brown paper. By varying the quantity of ink and by indicating strong accents and partially open shapes, Rembrandt created a drawing with many alternating tonalities that give the figures a fleeting rather than a painstakingly descriptive quality. The drawing is generally dated at the end of the 1650s, but it could also have been made somewhat later.
Peter Schatborn, 2017
Literature
O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 1140A (c. 1657-58); 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. 49, with earlier literature; M. Westermann, Rembrandt, London 2000, p. 304, fig. 194; C. Dittrich and T. Ketelsen et al., Rembrandt: Die Dresdener Zeichnungen, exh. cat. Dresden (Kupferstich-Kabinett) 2004, p. 202, under no. 115, fig. 1; M. Schapelhouman, Rembrandt and the Art of Drawing, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 62 and 64, fig. 57; G. Schwartz, De grote Rembrandt, Zwolle 2006, p. 61, fig. 96; U. Neidhardt and T. Ketelsen (eds.), Rembrandt van Rijn, die Entführung des Ganymed: Kabinettausstellung anlässlich der Restaurierung des Gemäldes, exh. cat. Dresden (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister) 2006-07, p. 81, fig. 4.1
Citation
P. Schatborn, 2017, 'Rembrandt van Rijn, Woman with Urinating Child and a Horse’s Head, Amsterdam, c. 1658 - c. 1660', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.28568
(accessed 22 November 2024 19:44:54).