Lambert Harmensz. Doomer

In 1645, Lambert Doomer set off by sea from his native Amsterdam to visit his brother, who was living and working as part of the community of Dutch artists and merchants in the western French city of Nantes. Travelling for part of the time with fellow artist Willem Schellinks, whose diaries are an important art-historical resource, Doomer sailed first to the Isle of Wight and then to La Rochelle, entering the Loire at its mouth before proceeding to Nantes. Thereafter, he continued up the length of the Loire, and visited Paris and the south of France, before returning home. 

During the course of these travels, Doomer made numerous drawings, ranging from fairly rapid and unassuming sketches to more elaborately worked up views, and in many cases he then developed large finished drawings that are based on his travel sketches, drawings that often exist in several versions, made both at the time and in later decades (notably the 1670s). 

This study of a well near Nantes, inscribed, signed and dated by the artist on the reverse, is among the most spontaneous of Doomer's French travel sketches. Yet although he wrote on it the name of the location depicted, it has not so far proved possible to match this inscription with a known town or village. Other drawings by Doomer that are very comparable in their scale, technique and spontaneity include two in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge: one depicting the Cathedral of St. Peter, at Nantes, the other an unidentified farm building.¹ 

1. Cambridge, Fitzwilliam Museum, inv. nos. PD.272-1963 and PD.269-1963; W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, vol. 2, New York 1979, nos. 468^x and 471^x