Leonaert Bramer

As Michiel Plomp noted in his 1994 Delft exhibition catalogue entry for this drawing, a rural scene of this type is rare in Bramer's drawn oeuvre, and images of bagpipers are also unusual in 17th-century Dutch art. The rather finished nature of the drawing suggests, according to Plomp, that it might have been made for an albumamicorum; he compared the technique with two drawings by Bramer in the Abrams collection album amicorum, one of them dated 1635, and on these grounds proposes that the present drawing was also made some time in the 1630s.

Bramer was an extremely prolific draughtsman, making various series of related drawings illustrating biblical subjects, some of them in bright watercolor, others in combinations of brush and black and gray ink and wash, often on blue paper.  Only rarely did he work, as here, in black chalk, but that is perhaps the medium in which we are best able to see his considerable talent as as draughtsman, especially when he was depicting a pastoral, genre subject like this, which seems to reflect very strongly the influence of the bamboccianti, whose works Bramer would have encountered towards the end of his lengthy stay in Italy (from 1616 until 1628). 

1.  H.-U. Beck, 'Anmerkungen zu den Zeichnungssammlungen von Valerius Röver und Goll van Franckenstein', Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, vol.32, 1981, pp. 115, 124 n.11