Esaias van de Velde Amsterdam 1587 - 1630 The Hague

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Description

Esaias van de Velde
fishermen and beached boats before a fire tower
black chalk and brownish-violet wash

Provenance

Sir Robert Mond (L.2813a);
D.E. Brackley, London, his sale, London, Sotheby's, 1 December 1966, lot 41 (as Jan van Goyen);
Dr. C.R. Rudolf, London, sale, London, Sotheby's, 28 March 1968, lot 132 (as Pieter Molyn, to Douwes);
with Gebr. Douwes Fine Art, Amsterdam

Exhibited

Amsterdam, Gebr. Douwes, Esaias van de Velde/Jan van Goyen, 1981, p.13, illus.

Literature

Tancred Borenius and Rudolf Wittkower, Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings by the Old Masters formed by Sir Robert Mond, London n.d. (1937), cat.409 (as Jan van Goyen);
George S. Keyes, Esaias van den Velde 1587-1630, Doornspijk 1984, p.281, cat. D 214, illus. pl.191

Catalogue Note

This fine, atmospheric depiction of fisherfolk working away on the sea shore belongs to a group of drawings by Esaias that Keyes links to a dismembered sketchbook of around 1624 (see Literature). Unlike the very rapidly drawn landscapes in the groundbreaking first sketchbook of 1618-20, Esaias has here worked his initial chalk sketches up, using a distinctive brownish-violet wash. Though they still retain much of the spontaneity of the artist's pure chalk sketches on this scale, the resulting drawings gain from this wash an increased pictorial completeness, and therefore stand as some kind of link between the artist's rapid, early sketches and the much more highly finished drawings that constitute an equally important and characteristic aspect of his work.

At the time of writing his 1984 monograph on the artist, Keyes knew of around a dozen sheets from this sketchbook; other examples are in Berlin, Amsterdam, Washington, Brussels, Cologne and other collections (for a full list, see Keyes, op.cit. below, p.234, under cat.D68).