Nicolaes Pietersz. Berchem

Dr. Herpin, Paris;
Maugras collection, Paris

Fixed down the left side to an old (18th-century?) album sheet. Drawing was at some point folded horizontally across the middle. A little light foxing, but otherwise good, fresh condition.
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Drawings by Nicolaes Berchem are hardly rare, but only a tiny proportion of those that are known depict religious subjects.  Rightly famed for his Italianate landscapes populated with happy herders, his historical and religious works form a numerically small but particularly interesting aspect of his work, with few parallels in the work of Berchem's Dutch contemporaries. 

The most important examples are a set of twelve large, highly accomplished drawings depicting episodes from the life of Christ and that of the Virgin, which came to auction in 2009.¹  Another rather heterogeneous group of religious and mythological drawings by Berchem in the Bremen museum was recently published by Annemarie Stefes,² and a fine 1648 drawing of The Annunciation, perhaps related to a frontispiece engraved in 1663 by Theodoor Matham after a design by Berchem, is now bound into a grangerized Bible in the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California.³  Also, around 1669 Berchem made a series of small drawings of religious subjects as designs for vignettes in the decorative borders of maps.⁴  But apart from these, only a very few religious drawings by the artist are known.

Berchem did paint several fine religious and mythological canvases⁵, but there are no direct connections between his known religious drawings and any paintings or prints, so the reason why Berchem made these drawings of religious subjects remains something of a mystery.  

1.  Sale, London, Sotheby's, 8 July 2009, lot 34; A. Heppner, 'Nicolaes Berchem als Illustrator van het nieuwe Testament, Het Gildeboek 23, 1940, pp. 81-85
2.  A. Stefes, 'Eleven History Drawings by Nicolaes Berchem', in Master Drawings, vol. 35, 1997, no. 4, pp. 367-79
3. See European Drawings from the Kitto Bible, exh. cat., San Marino, California, Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, 1969-70, cat. 32
4. S.K. Bennett, 'Nine Religious Drawings by Nicolaes Berchem: Designs to Ornament Maps in a 1669 Bible,' The Hoogsteder Mercury 13/14 (1992), pp. 60-73
5. See Dutch Classicism, exh. cat., Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, and Frankfurt, Städelsches Kunstinstitut, 1999-2000, cat. 44 reproduced 2.