Govaert Flinck Kleve 1615 - 1660 Amsterdam

This drawing was unknown to Professor Werner Sumowski when he published the Flinck volume of his corpus of Drawings of the Rembrandt School (vol. 4, New York, 1981), but he described it in a subsequent article (see Literature), and will also include it in a forthcoming supplement to the Drawings of the Rembrandt School.

Sumowski believes this is a characteristic early drawing by the artist, executed shortly after 1640, when Flinck's style showed not only the infuence of his teacher, Rembrandt, but also that of the so-called pre-Rembrandtists.  He relates it to a group of similarly angular figure studies, of which the key sheet is in Dresden (Sumowski 960^x).  In the present composition, however, we also see another element not found in the Dresden drawing and the group of related sheets (Sumowski 961^x-964^x), namely the swirling, calligraphic foreground tree.  The handling in this motif is, however, closely comparable to that seen in some early landscape drawings by Flinck, including two signed and dated drawings of 1642, in Rotterdam and in the Lugt Collection (Sumowski 902-3). 

The combination of landscape and figural elements seen here seems to be unique in Flinck's work, and this drawing therefore represents the most concrete surviving evidence supporting Sumowski's dating for the Dresden drawing and the others associated with it.