Distraught Man Running towards a Woman Succouring a Fallen Man

Entry

The subject of the scene has not yet been identified. A man with long hair has fallen to the ground; we see only the hilt of the sword he is wearing at his side. A worried-looking woman kneels beside him, and to her right a distraught man, with his arms in the air, runs towards them. The drawing may represent Erminia tending the wounded Tancred, a scene from Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered (19:103-114): during the Egyptian assault on Jerusalem, the Christian knight Tancred was severely injured in combat with Argantes (whom he killed), and his servant and armour-bearer Vafrino quickly fetched his beloved, Erminia, the daughter of a former Saracen king of Antioch, to come tend to his wounds.

The sketch was begun in brown ink and further worked up with grey ink. The large rock on the left, several contours in the face and body of the running man and the hatching on the upper part of the woman’s body are rendered in grey. The drawing was purchased in 1964 as a work of Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-1674), a pupil of Rembrandt during the second half of the 1630s. The style, however, is comparable to that of another pupil in that period, namely Jan Victors. Many of his drawings of biblical subjects have a loose, sketchy quality, with both long and short strokes of the pen, and passages of multi-directional hatching for the shadows, sometimes widely separated, sometimes close together. The starting-point for the reconstruction of Victors’ drawn oeuvre is a drawing of Haman Begging Esther for Mercy on the recto of a double-sided sheet in the Kunsthalle, Bremen (inv. no. 09/730),² with a more painterly, worked-up rendition of the same subject on the verso.³

The recumbent man in this sketch is similar to the sleeping figure in the drawing of Jacob’s Dream, now attributed to Victors, in the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA (inv. no. 1976.3),⁴ and to the figure of the dead Christ in the drawing of The Entombment in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 2686), also now given to Victors.⁵ By the same token, the open, sketchy handling of the distraught, running man resembles various figures in drawings by Victors, such as Lot and his Family Departing Sodom, in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. no. 8767r),⁶ and the Calling of Matthew, in the Nationalmuseum, Stockholm (inv. no. 2011/1863).⁷

This draughtsmanhip – with its detached lines and passages of hatching – is typical of several autograph drawings by Rembrandt, on which Victors clearly based his sketch. The running man is similar to the figure at upper right in the drawing of Christ Falling under the Cross on the Way to Calvary, in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 1554).⁸ Other aspects of the scene in the Amsterdam drawing seem to be a sort of paraphrase of the right section of this sketch, since we also see a woman bending over a fallen figure, in this case the mother of Christ. The extremely detached, almost scratchy treatment of line can also be found in the Kupferstichkabinett’s double-sided drawing with The Lamentation on the recto (KdZ 2312) and Sketches of Soldiers and Women (for the Prodigal Son?) on the verso.⁹ The faces of the figures in The Lamentation are almost as free in form as those in the museum’s drawing with the exception of the face of Christ, the main figure in the scene, which Victors may have used as a model for his figure of a fallen man.

The present drawing is one of the many examples that show that pupils studied Rembrandt’s drawings carefully and used them as models for their own compositions. Borrowing motifs from various scenes and reassembling them to form new compositions of other subjects is typical of the way in which the students worked.

Peter Schatborn, 2018