Rembrandt and His School: Masterworks from the Frick and
Lugt Collections
February 15, 2011, through May 15, 2011
Partial Show Extension: Works on loan from the Lugt Collection will remain on view in the Lower-Level Exhibition Galleries through May 22. See a Virtual Tour of the paintings in the Oval Room.
Checklist of Prints and Drawings Acquired by Lugt (Part II)
Part I | Part II
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Jacob Pynas (1592/93–after 1650)
The Descent from the Cross
early 1630s
Pen and brown ink on light brown paper
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Pynas was a forerunner and contemporary of Rembrandt's in the field of history painting, active in Amsterdam and in Delft. In this study, once attributed to Rembrandt's teacher Pieter Lastman, Christ's brightly lit body and the figures who struggle under its weight occupy the immediate foreground. His mourners are placed, unusually, in the right background where the Virgin faints into the arms of Saint John the Evangelist. The symmetry of the composition is reminiscent of Italian Renaissance prototypes, which may explain why the sheet was inscribed with Andrea del Sarto's name at some point in its history.
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Jan Lievens (1607–1674)
A Hilly Landscape with a Dilapidated House
probably 1660s
Pen and brown ink
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Jan Lievens (1607–1674)
Portrait of Jan Francken, the Servant of Johan
van Oldenbarnevelt
later 1640s or 1650s
Pen and brown ink
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A gifted painter, draftsman, etcher, and fellow native of Leiden, Jan Lievens collaborated with Rembrandt between 1625 and 1631, sharing models and possibly a studio and occasionally even working together on pictures. This sensitive portrait of Francken, a loyal servant to the Advocat of Holland and a chronicler of his master's later imprisonment and beheading, demonstrates Lievens's accomplished draftsmanship and bold use of contrast, skills he very likely honed during his apprenticeship with Pieter Lastman between 1619 and 1621.
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Jan Lievens (1607–1674) or
Jan Andrea Lievens (1644–1680)
View in a Wood
1660s
Pen and brown ink with brown wash
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Opinion varies on whether this sheet is by Jan Lievens or by his son, Jan Andrea. Within this dense woodland scene, a horse appears near the bottom left, leading the viewer down a narrowing path.
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
The Centurion of Capernaum Kneeling
before Christ
later 1630s
Pen and brown ink with gray and brown wash, some lines
in black chalk, and corrections in white body color
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Van den Eeckhout was another of Rembrandt's pupils of the late 1630s and early 1640s who became an independent master in Amsterdam in 1641. This student sheet, which bears corrections in white, depicts one of the miracles of Christ: impressed by the faith of the centurion (seen kneeling here), Christ agrees to heal the man's ailing servant simply by "speaking the word." This complex scene, which features several subsidiary figures, shows the young artist trying his hand at a variety of poses and expressions and a range of techniques.
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
Self-Portrait (?)
1647
Point of the brush in black and gray ink with black and
gray-brown wash
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
The City Walls of Delft with the Mill Called
The Rose
c. 1645
Black chalk and gray wash
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
Youth Smoking
1650s
Point of brush and brown ink with brown and some gray
wash
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This sheet demonstrates the precise, painterly mode of van den Eeckhout's work in brush and wash, which contrasts with Rembrandt's more linear approach. Nonetheless, his variation of the intensity of his washes and manipulation of the bare paper to create the illusion of three-dimensional form and space are reminiscent of Rembrandt's draftsmanship. Deft strokes of wash in two tones give shape to the boy's youthful face.
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
Studies of a Dog Lying Down
1650s
Point of brush in brown ink with brown wash
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
View of Gorinchem
c. 1661–65
Pen and brown ink and watercolor over a drawing in
black chalk
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This joined sheet is the left half of a large panoramic view of a city in the western part of the Netherlands: Gorinchem's churches, town hall, tollhouse, and barracks are visible beyond the tall trees and bushes in the background. This view of the city, from the far bank of the Waal River looking to the northeast, was one favored by artists.
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
Designs for Title Pages in Polybius's Histories
c. 1669
Pen and brown ink with brown wash over traces of
black chalk
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Van den Eeckhout created these designs for a 1670 Amsterdam edition of the history of the Roman Empire written by the Greek historian Polybius (before 199–c. 120 bc). Featured in these frontispieces for two of the book's volumes are various military scenes within an ornamental framework, rendered loosely but with clear
demarcations of light and dark for the engraver to follow.
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
The Satyr and the Peasant
c. 1653
Black and red chalk with gray wash and watercolor in brown, brown-yellow, and pink
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This scene from one of Aesop's fables was depicted by a few members of Rembrandt's circle in the 1650s. In van den Eeckhout's version, the peasant and his family still enjoy the warmth of the satyr's rustic home as their host is taken aback at the sight of his guest blowing on his spoonful to cool the steaming food, when he had also blown on his hands to warm them up. Disturbed by the idea of a man whose breath blows hot and cold, the satyr raises his finger to send the peasant away.
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621–1674)
Hannah Presents Her Son Samuel to the High Priest Eli
mid-1660s
Pen and brown ink with gray, black, and dark violet wash over a sketch in black chalk
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Govert Flinck (1615–1660)
Reclining Female Nude
1640s
Black and yellowish white chalk on blue paper
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Flinck, Rembrandt's first documented pupil in
Amsterdam, studied with the master for about a
year between 1635 and 1636 before becoming a
successful portraitist and history painter. In this
study from life, a nude model takes on a pose
from ancient statuary. Flinck, however, renders the
contours of her body with a series of connected and
overlapping strokes that accentuate the softness of
her flesh.
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Govert Flinck (1615–1660)
Sleeping Child
1643
Pen and brown ink with light brown wash
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Govert Flinck (1615–1660)
Landscape with a Willow Tree and a Building
near a Stone Bridge
1642
Pen and brown ink with gray, brown, and gray-brown wash
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Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678)
Death of the Virgin
c. 1645–50
Pen and brown ink with brown wash and additions of red and black chalk
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Samuel van Hoogstraten spent much of the 1640s with Rembrandt, after which he pursued a successful career in his native Dordrecht and other cities in and outside the Dutch Republic. In this drawing from his years in his master's studio, van Hoogstraten looks to both Rembrandt and Albrecht Dürer as models. He goes further than both in presenting this religious subject as a contemporary domestic scene, placing the Virgin in a bakermat, a wicker bed commonly used for the ill in the Dutch Republic. The curtain in the foreground may be an allusion to the practice of covering paintings with real curtains and thus an element of trompe-l'oeil, one of van Hoogstraten's great interests as a painter.
It has recently been proposed that the scene may represent the death of Saint Anne, with Joachim behind the dying woman and wailing women, an old man, and a rabbi in attendance.
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Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678)
Study of a Camel
1640s
Pen and brown ink with brown wash
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Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678)
A Kitchen with a Boy Warming Himself at the
Fire
c. 1648
Pen and point of brush in brown ink with brown and gray wash
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Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678)
Title Page: The Muse Erato
1678
Pen and brown ink with brown wash over traces of black chalk
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This sheet bears a design for the title page of the fourth book of the major art treatise van Hoogstraten authored, which was published in the year of his death. Erato, the Greek muse of lyric poetry, associated most immediately with poems of amorous and erotic themes, sits before an Italianate landscape, accompanied by Cupid and holding a horn of plenty with discarded armor — an emblem of the conquest of love. Here, she serves as an allegory of the fecundity of nature and as a trope for van Hoogstraten's entreaty to painters to study the natural world in all its abundance. To extend the metaphor, he includes a personification of love in the sky above and a depiction of Noah's ark in the left background, though, oddly, the animals are presented individually rather than in pairs.
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Constantijn van Renesse (1626–1680)
A Road between Trees Leading to a Farmhouse
c. 1652–53
Pen and brown ink with brown wash, heightened with white body color
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Once considered a masterpiece by Rembrandt,
this drawing displays an inconsistent handling
that later led scholars to question its authorship
and prompted a more convincing ascription to
Constantijn van Renesse, Rembrandt's pupil for
several years beginning in 1649. Educated in
languages and mathematics at the University of
Leiden and made the town clerk of Eindhoven in
1653, Renesse was an amateur artist who seems to
have studied also under Rembrandt's former student
Samuel van Hoogstraten.
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Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680) (formerly
attributed to Rembrandt)
Elijah Sleeping beneath a Tree
third quarter of the 1630s
Pen and brown ink |
Long attributed to Rembrandt, this sheet is now
identified as the work of Ferdinand Bol, a portraitist
and history painter who was present in Rembrandt's
studio from the later 1630s through the beginning
of the 1640s. In this preparatory study for a
painting depicting the Old Testament story of
Elijah's flight into the wilderness, Bol skillfully
imitates Rembrandt's rapid and loose penwork.
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Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680)
The Angel Appearing to Hagar in the Desert
late 1630s
Pen, brown and gray ink with gray wash |
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Ferdinand Bol (1616–1680)
View in the Dunes near Haarlem
1640s
Black chalk with brown and gray wash
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Philips Koninck (1619–1688)
River Landscape with a Town on the Horizon
c. 1660
Pen and brown ink with brown wash and watercolor |
Koninck, who worked primarily as a landscape
painter, did not study with Rembrandt but admired
and emulated his work. This sheet shares with some
of the master's landscape prints a high vantage point
and a wide, panoramic format. Koninck's controlled
application of watercolor yields a splendid passage
of glassy water in the left foreground of the sheet, in
which untouched areas of the paper serve to convey
the vivid reflections of sunlight.
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Philips Koninck (1619–1688)
The Mocking of Christ
late 1650s/c. 1662
Pen, brush, brown ink, and brown wash |
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Philips Koninck (1619–1688)
Panoramic River Landscape
c. 1650–55
Pen and brown ink with brown and gray-brown wash |
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Lambert Doomer (1624–1700)
View of the Godesburg and the Drachenfels
1663
Pen and brown ink with brown and gray wash |
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Lambert Doomer (1624–1700)
View of Mönchengladbach
1663
Black chalk with brown, gray, grayish-green, and ocher watercolor |
A celebrated topographical draftsman, Doomer
made frequent sketching trips, including a tour up
the Rhine in 1663, where his itinerary featured visits
to the western German cities of Mönchengladbach
and Godesburg and the mountain Drachenfels
("Dragon's Rock") in the Siebengebirge mountain
range. Executed on site in black chalk and later
finished with watercolor, Doomer's depiction of
Mönchengladbach shows the hilltop Church of
St. Vitus and the rising spire of the Martkirche at
left. His fluid panorama illustrating the fortress
of Godesburg and the castle of Drachenfels was
rendered in pen and ink, then worked up in color.
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Lambert Doomer (1624–1700)
Standing Donkey with a Saddle
c. 1645–46
Black chalk with brown and gray wash |
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Attributed to Carel Fabritius (1622–1654)
(formerly attributed to Rembrandt)
Rebecca and Eliezer at the Well
c. 1640–45
Pen and brown ink with brown and gray wash, heightened with white body color |
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In his short life, ended by the explosion of a
gunpowder magazine in Delft, Carel Fabritius
produced a small but magnificent painted oeuvre
that earned him a reputation as one of the great
masters of the Dutch Golden Age. In this rare
surviving drawing, newly attributed to the artist
and dating to the years of his apprenticeship
with Rembrandt, Fabritius comes close to his
master's manipulation of line in the service of
depth, using thin lines for the landscape in the
background and thick lines for the figures in
the immediate foreground.
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Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693)
Seated Woman Scraping a Parsnip
c. 1655
Point of the brush in brown ink
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Nicolaes Maes (1634–1693)
Woman Embroidering
c. 1654–58
Red chalk, brown and reddish brown wash
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A native of Dordrecht, Maes moved to Amsterdam
to train in Rembrandt's studio sometime between
1648 and 1653 and soon achieved recognition
as an accomplished genre painter and, later, as
a successful portraitist. Between 1654 and 1658
Maes executed numerous drawings of women
engaged in household tasks, often using his wife,
Adriana Brouwers, as his model. The framing line
and finished character of this sheet may indicate
that it was a drawing made for a collector.
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Principal funding for the exhibition is provided by The Christian Humann Foundation, Jean-Marie and Elizabeth Eveillard, and Melvin R. Seiden.
Corporate support is provided by Fiduciary Trust Company International.
The exhibition is also supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and the Humanities.
The catalogue is made possible by the Robert Lehman Foundation, Inc. It is also underwritten, in part, by public funds from the Netherlands Cultural Services and by the Netherland-America Foundation. |
