Attributed to Gérard de Lairesse

Henry Scipio Reitlinger (L.2274a);
with Alister Mathews, Bournemouth, from whom purchased, March 1956

Newcastle, 1960, no. 24

As Norbert Middelkoop has kindly pointed out, this drawing is closely related in subject to the fine oil sketch by Lairesse, Allegory of the Glory of Amsterdam, executed around 1685, and now in the Amsterdam Museum (formerly the Amsterdams Historisch Museum).¹  Just as in the painting, we see here a seated female personification of Amsterdam, accompanied by the city's arms, presenting a map of the distinctive concentric rings of canals, while behind we see Jacob van Campen's famous Town Hall, with its statue of Hercules atop the pediment.  The subject is also closely related to the iconography of images associated with the fourth major phase in the expansion of the city of Amsterdam, starting in the 1660s, which saw the construction of a swathe of new canals from the Leidsegracht all the way round to the River Amstel. 

The painting, an unrealised design for a lunette intended for the Burgerzaal in the new Town Hall, is, of course, a much more extensive composition, in which these central motifs are surrounded by many other figures and elements, but the main subject is none the less clearly the same.  Unfortunately the onset of blindness left Lairesse unable to execute the wall painting itself, which was ultimately completed by his pupils Jan Hoogsaat and Gerrit Rademaker in 1708.  If the present drawing does indeed relate to the planning of this painting, it must have been executed at a very early stage in the process, when the artist was concentrating only on the central group.  A fine study by Lairesse for the whole composition, much closer to the final work, was on the Paris art market in 1925.²  In its handling, the present drawing is, however, closer to some of the artist's more linear and sketchy drawings, such as the Portrait of Filips de Flines, in the Rijksmuseum, the Solomon and Queen of Sheba, in Edinburgh, or the fine, inscribed 1688 drawing of The Battle between Menelaeus and Paris, now in Berlin.³

1.  Inv. SA 8214; A. Roy, Gérard de Lairesse 1640-1711, Paris 1992, pp. 323-5, no. P. 173
2.  Sale, Collection Mme V..., paris, Drouot, 30 March 1925, lot 123 (as School of Rembrandt); Roy, op. cit., pp. 325-6, no. Cf.D. 158
3.  Roy, op. cit., nos. D. 24, D. 50, D. 168