Lot 32
  • 32

* Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus Bruges 1523 - 1605 Florence

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Description

  • Jan van der Straet, called Stradanus
  • the wild boar hunt
  • drawn with the brush in brown and gray wash, heightened with white, over pen and brown ink. The boar in the foreground drawn on a separate piece of paper, stuck down. Indented for transfer.

Provenance

with Bernard Quaritch, 1886 (Catalogue of Manuscripts, no. 35768);
William A. Baillie-Grohman (L.370), one of fifty-six Stradanus drawings owned by him;
his widow, Mrs. Baillie-Grohman;
her sale, London, Sotheby's, 14 May 1923, in lot 157, 158, 159 or 161;
C.F.G.R. Schwerdt;
his sale, London, Sotheby's, 10 July 1929, part of lot 1305;
Marcel Jeanson;
his sale, Monaco, Sotheby's, 1 March 1987, lot 516 (purchased by the present owner).

Literature

C.F.G.R. Schwerdt, Hunting, Hawking, Shooting illustrated in a catalogue of books, manuscripts, prints and drawings, collected by C.F.G.R. Schwerdt, London 1928, vol. III, no. 11;
W. Bok van Kammen, Stradanus and the Hunt, thesis for Johns Hopkins University 1977, reproduced by University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, Michigan, 1982, p.310;
A.  B. Vannucci, Jan Van Der Straet detto Giovanni Stradano, Milan 1997, p. 249, no. 320, reproduced (the print illustrated p. 375)

Catalogue Note

This belongs to the large series of drawings by Stradanus depicting activities relating to the hunt, works which constitute the main basis for his high reputation as an artist. The origin of the series lay in a commission which Stradanus received while living in Florence during the 1560s to produce a series of 28 tapestry designs with hunting subjects for the duke Cosimo de'Medici's villa at Poggio a Caiano. In 1567 he made a series of drawings recording the composition of these tapestries as preparatory studies for engravings. The first six of these prints were published by Hieronymous Cock in Antwerp in 1570, while the rest of the series was issued over the following decade, first by Cock's widow, and then by Philip Galle. This set of prints proved so popular that Stradanus spent much of the rest of his life executing further drawings of similar subjects to be engraved and issued in ever larger series of prints. The number of plates included in the four known 'complete' editions of prints after his hunting scenes increased progessively from the original 28 to 44, then to 61, and finally to no fewer than 104. The series containing 44 plates first appeared in, or shortly after, 1580 and the present drawing is the study, in reverse, for plate 23 in that edition.
Stradanus frequently made corrections to his preparatory drawings, as he did here.