Esaias van de Velde Amsterdam 1587 - 1630 The Hague

This previously unrecorded drawing belongs to an important group of early pen landscapes by Esaias, executed before he turned to the combination of chalk and wash that he used for most of his later drawings.  Building on the example of Goltzius' revolutionary landscape drawings of the first years of the century, the drawings in this medium made during the 1610s by Esaias, and also by his brother Jan, are pioneering works in Dutch landscape drawing, recording down-to-earth corners of the Dutch landscape in a highly respectful manner that has no precedents in earlier landscape traditions.  Amongst the closest in style to this drawing are two others of almost the same dimensions, one dated 1616, in the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, and another, perhaps slightly later, in the Van Regteren Altena Collection (see G. Keyes, Esaias van den Velde, Doornspijk 1984, cat. nos. D.171, D172, D 137, reproduced figs. 70, 71, 92, respectively).