Jacob Savery I Kortrijk circa 1565 - 1603 Amsterdam

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Description

Jacob Savery I
mountainous river landscape with a castle to the left
pen and brown ink, within black ink framing lines

Provenance

J.D. Böhm, Vienna (L.271, L.272 and L.1442);
Ferdinandeum, Innsbruck (bears mark, verso, not in Lugt)

Literature

An Zwollo, 'Jacob Savery, Nachvolger von Pieter Bruegel und Hans Bol', in Pieter Bruegel und Seine Welt, ed. Otto von Simson and Matthias Winner, Berlin 1979, p. 208, note 27

Catalogue Note

Following a period of stylistic dependency on the works of his teacher Hans Bol, Jacob (or Jacques) Savery began, during the second half of the 1590s, to draw in a very different manner, much closer to that of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Indeed, many of Savery's drawings of this period may even have been made in conscious imitation of Bruegel: a number bear very early spurious signatures, and one at least was already attributed to Bruegel in 1598, when it was engraved by Jacques de Gheyn (see, most recently, Nadine M. Orenstein (ed.), Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Drawings and Prints, exhibition catalogue, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, and New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001, p. 277).

This and the following lot belong to a stylistically coherent group of some twenty-five drawings by Savery, executed in a distinctive manner which combines a considerable freedom of penwork in certain areas with regular cross-hatching and occasionally precise attention to detail. Some are more meticulous in handling than these two, which are at the most fluid end of the artist's range, but all are clearly by the same hand, and almost all were at some time attributed to Brueghel, whether or not they bear a false signature. Ever since the 1920s, some authors have questioned that attribution, but it was only in 1986 that Mielke definitively removed the whole group from Brueghel's oeuvre and tentatively proposed the now generally accepted attribution to Savery, on the basis of comparison with the few signed drawings by that artist (see H. Mielke, review of exhibition catalogue L'Epoque de Lucas van Leyde et Pierre Bruegel: Dessins des anciens Pays-Bas: Collection Frits Lugt, in Master Drawings, vol. XXIII-XXIV 1985-6, pp. 75-90). Amongst the most similar to these two in style are the landscapes in Vienna, Berlin, Rotterdam and Besançon (see H. Mielke, Pieter Bruegel, Die Zeichnungen, Belgium (Brepols) 1996, cat. nos. A21, A28, A35-A38).

Two other drawings by Savery also formerly in the Böhm collection were sold, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 15 November 1995, lots 25 and 26.