Jan Asselyn

This belongs to a stylistically fairly consistent group of landscape drawings on blue paper, which Steland accepted as the work of Asselijn, but about which Schatborn has some reservations.¹ Several of these drawings bear either Asselijn's name or his guild nickname, Crabbetje, inscribed in a seventeenth-century hand, and it is possible that some of these inscriptions are actually by Willem Schellinks; it therefore seems justified to retain the traditional attribution to Asselijn in the case of the present work and the others with which it can be associated. Another very similar coastal scene from the same group was sold in Amsterdam in 1993.²

^1. See A. C. Steland, op. cit., pp.79-125, and P. Schatborn, Drawn to Warmth, 17th-century Dutch artists in Italy, Amsterdam 2001, pp. 108-109

^2.  Christie's, 15 November 1993, lot 56