Rijksmuseum

Object data

point of brush and grey wash, over graphite; framing line in light brown ink

height 374 mm × width 534 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed on verso: upper left, in a seventeenth-century-hand, in brown ink, 60

Technical notes

Watermark: Coat of arms, hardly legible, with a figure or an animal inside (?)

Condition

Vertical fold; yellowish stain left of centre

Provenance

…; from the dealer E. Douwes, Amsterdam, fl. 4,200, to the museum, 1967

Object number: RP-T-1967-81(R)

The artist

Jan Worst (active c. 1645-1660)

As Houbraken reported, he was a painter of Italianate landscapes and close friend of Johannes Lingelbach (1622-1674), with whom he was in Rome. Since Lingelbach travelled in 1644 to Italy, where he is recorded from 1647 to 1650, this provides a clue for the date of Worst’s stay in the south. Like most of his compatriots, Worst chose the route through France on his way back to the Netherlands, spending at least several months in the area of Lyon. This is confirmed by autograph inscriptions naming French sites on two drawings, one in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the View in Vienne, Looking South toward the Bridge over the Rhône and the Tour de Valois, which is dated 19 July 1655 (inv. no. JWORST 2),¹ and another, whose current whereabouts are unknown, the Old Castle and a Chapel on the Bank of a River, which bears a date of 20 January 1656.² The Rijksprentenkabinet’s inv. no. RP-T-1954-156 is dated the same day as the Rotterdam drawing and although the site is not specified, we know from the subject-matter that it, too, was drawn near Vienne. Worst apparently made panoramic landscapes together with Frederik de Moucheron (1633-1686), who not only worked in a similar style but also sometimes depicted the same views.³

Although Worst must also have been active as a painter, to date only drawings by him are known. This evidently was already the case in the early eighteenth century, when Houbraken stated that ‘one seldom sees his paintings, since he spent most of his time drawing on paper, which drawings were held in high esteem by the connoisseurs’.⁴ In the 1660s, probably after his return to the Netherlands, Worst also drew studio versions of his French landscape drawings for the Atlas Van der Hem, a fifty-volume collection of topographical views assembled by Laurens van der Hem (1621-1678) and now preserved in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna.⁵ Although a drawing of a Landscape with Rocks in a River, near the Grande Chartreuse, in the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento (inv. no. 1871,575), used to be regarded as his last known work from 1686⁶, Schatborn now interprets the inscribed date as ‘1656’, which situates it in Worst’s French period.⁷

Annemarie Stefes, 2018

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, II (1719), p. 147; G. Jansen and G. Luijten, Italianisanten en bamboccianten. Het italianisierend landschap en genre door Nederlandse kunstenaars uit de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen) 1988, p. 119; D. Scrase and T. Vignau-Wilberg, Das goldene Jahrhundert: Holländische Meisterzeichnungen aus dem Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge, exh. cat. Munich (Staatliche Graphische Sammlung)/Heidelberg (Kurpfälzisches Museum)/Braunschweig (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum)/Cambridge (Fitzwilliam Museum) 1995-96, under no. 48; P. Schatborn, with J. Verberne, Drawn to Warmth: 17th-century Dutch Artists in Italy, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001, pp. 128-31; S. Alsteens and H. Buijs, Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris 2008, pp. 199, 203-9, 301-6; P. Schatborn, ‘Two Drawings of Tivoli by Jan Worst’, Master Drawings 53 (2015), no. 4, pp. 467-70; P. Schatborn, ‘Drawings by Jan Worst’, Master Drawings 58 (2020), no. 1, pp. 29-78

Entry

The recto shows a view of the lower parts of the Great Cascade at Tivoli, whereas the verso features a wider view of the waterfalls, seen from the left bank of the River Anio. The same view, from roughly the same vantage, is depicted in a drawing tentatively attributed to Claes Moeyaert (1591-1669) in the Louvre, Paris (inv. no. RF 14630).⁸

The present drawing entered the collection as ‘attributed to Asselijn’ but was not included in the 1989 catalogue raisonné of Asselijn’s drawings by Steland.⁹ After being briefly associated with Adam Pijnacker (c. 1620/22-1673), based on its perceived similarity to drawings by him recorded in copies and prints after him, such as anonymous sheet in the Amsterdam Museum (inv. no. TA 10266) or a reproductive print by Cornelis Brouwer (1731-1803) in our own collection (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-BI-4909),¹⁰ and later tentatively assigned with a query by Marijn Schapelhouman to Horatius de Hooch (active 1652-1686),¹¹ it was recently reattributed to Jan Worst by Schatborn on stylistic grounds. Schatborn noted as typical of the artist the contrast between the crisply applied darkest shades of grey wash on the rocks and the lighter shades or the blank white areas of the paper.¹² Sometimes the dark passages are not completely integrated with the forms they define and thus seem to stand apart. Moreover, the loose, rounded loops used for rendering vegetation can be found in inv. no. RP-T-1884-A-388, another drawing of an Italian subject, with a traditional attribution to Worst. Both sheets share a certain nervousness in the swiftly applied passages of wash. At the same time, small dabs of ink – for instance, in the left part of the present drawing’s recto – foreshadow Worst’s more refined style of the mid-1650s, when he was documented in France (e.g. inv. no. RP-T-1954-156).

The present drawing’s spontaneous appearance is typical of a sketch done in situ, with the fluently rendered foreground betraying the artist’s focus on the more distant motifs. A sense of authenticity is enhanced by the recto’s detail of a draughtsman sketching the waterfalls.¹³

Annemarie Stefes, 2018

Literature

‘Keuze uit aanwinsten’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 4 (1967), p. 151 (as ‘attributed to Asselijn’); L.C.J. Frerichs, Berchem en de Bentgenoten in Italië, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1970, no. 38 (as ‘Asselijn’); P. Schatborn, ‘Two Drawings of Tivoli by Jan Worst’, Master Drawings 53 (2015), no. 4, pp. 468-70 (figs. 2 (recto)-3 (verso)); P. Schatborn, ‘Drawings by Jan Worst’, Master Drawings 58 (2020), no. 1, pp. 43 (figs. 28 (recto)-29 (verso)), 45, 46, 68, no. 2

Citation

A. Stefes, 2018, 'attributed to Jan Worst, View of the Cascade at Tivoli with a Draughtsman / verso: View of the Large Waterfall at Tivoli, Tivoli, c. 1647 - c. 1655', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.64525

(accessed 27 November 2024 04:47:17).