The Drawing Lesson

Entry

This painting is one of two from 1634 by Ter Borch that show a half-length figure of a young artist seated at a table, studying the fall of candlelight on plaster casts. The other painting, which was sold at Christie’s London in 1977, is somewhat smaller (fig. a).⁸ With the exception of the écorché and the female bust, which only appear in the Rijksmuseum painting, the casts are identical in the two works. They have been identified as a bust of Heliogabalus (blocking the candle in the present painting), the Spinario, a female figure representing Architecture after Giambologna, and a child’s head that is reminiscent of Duquesnoy’s work.⁹ In both paintings the candle is concealed by centrally placed objects, starkly illuminating the nearby casts and causing them to cast strong shadows on the background wall.

Sixteenth-century Italian prints, such as the 1531 engraving by Agostino Veneziano after Baccio Bandinelli showing artists sitting at a table drawing from statuettes by candlelight, were a likely inspiration for Ter Borch. In contrast to these prints, however, the light source is concealed in Ter Borch’s two paintings of young boys drawing, as well as in his Supper at Emmaus in Warsaw.¹⁰ This use of masked artificial illumination was undoubtedly derived from works by Gerard van Honthorst from the 1620s, such as The Procuress from 1625 in Utrecht.¹¹ The subject of the young draughtsman, however, was not one treated by Honthorst, nor any other Utrecht Caravaggist. Depictions of young artists studying from plaster casts executed in other Dutch towns, such as a painting in the Louvre now definitively attributed to Jan Lievens,¹² or a painting in Brussels attributed to Pieter Codde,¹³ both from the second half of the 1620s may, perhaps, also have inspired Ter Borch’s depictions. It is tempting to hypothesize that Ter Borch came to know Lievens’s work by way of the Leiden painter’s admirer, Constantijn Huygens. One year after the execution of the present painting, Ter Borch wrote to Huygens requesting that he recommend him to Frederik Hendrik for the position of bailiff in Buren. It also seems significant in this context that the present painting is listed in an inventory of the Oranges’ estate Huis ter Nieuburch in 1707, and can be seen in an engraving showing one of the rooms of this estate from a decade earlier.¹⁴ The painting may have been executed for Huygens’s employer, Stadholder Frederik Hendrik.

Unlike the other depiction of a young artist from 1634, the Rijksmuseum painting is set within a painted oval. Whereas the young artist is shown alone drawing in the other painting, in this one he points to his printed drawing manual and is accompanied by a grown-up. The red cap with white lace headband worn by this figure identifies him as a master-painter. Although an odd looking article of clothing, this kind of cap appears in a number of 17th-century artists’ portraits.¹⁵ The boy’s clothing on the other hand seems to be from the 16th century, and is quite unlike the contemporary dress worn by his counterpart in the other 1634 painting. The tight-fitting doublet with slashed puffs at the shoulders and lower arms, and the tunic, correspond to the fancy dress of Honthorst’s figures in paintings of the Prodigal Son and merry companies. The present painting therefore has a historicizing aspect that Ter Borch’s other painting of a young artist does not have.

When the museum’s collection was transferred from the Trippenhuis to its present location in 1885, Ter Borch’s painting was found, rolled up, in the attic.¹⁶ The painting’s whereabouts between 1795, when Prince Willem V’s collection was confiscated by the French, and 1885 is not known with certainty. It may have been among the works taken to Paris by the French and repossessed in 1815.¹⁷ The fact that it was not among the repossessed paintings from Willem V’s collection that formed the basis of the Mauritshuis collection, suggests that it entered the collection in the Trippenhuis in that year.¹⁸

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 26.