Aert de Gelder

Sir Charles Greville (L.549),
The Earl of Warwick,
his sale, London, Sotheby's, 17 June 1936, lot 103 (as Rembrandt),
where purchased by Marignane;
Robert von Hirsch, Basel,
his sale, London, Sotheby's, 20 June 1978, lot 41 (as Rembrandt);
John R. Gaines,
his sale, New York, Sotheby's, 17 November 1986, lot 21 (as Rembrandt), purchased by the present owner

Rotterdam, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, and Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, Rembrandt, 1956, p. 175, no. 243 (as Rembrandt)

O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, 6 vols., London 1954-57, vol. V, p. 315, no. 1115, fig. 1333;
E. Haverkamp Begemann, Review of O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt,  Kunstchronik, XIV, 1961, p. 26 (as Rembrandt with washes by another hand);
H. Redeker, Rembrandt, Berlin/Munich 1965, p. 88, pl. 41 (as Rembrandt);
K. Clark, Rembrandt and Italian Renaissance, London 1966, pp. 32-33, fig. 26 (as Rembrandt);
O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, 2nd edition, revised and enlarged by Eva Benesch, London 1973, vol. V, p. 302, no. 1115, fig. 1410 (as Rembrandt)

Condition Report by Alan Firkser: There are a series of creases and wrinkles at the left side and across the upper section of the work. The strongest crease at the left may even be split in places, at the least it is very worn. The vellum is backed, one can assume, to hold creases down and support the worn or split areas. The strong buckling is not unexpected with a vellum sheet and is probably exacerbated by the push/pull of the backing sheet and adhesive employed. Magnification shows the uneven fiber-like clumpy and puckering texture of a skin as opposed to a manufactured paper product which, in general, would be more uniform.
In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective qualified opinion.
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Considered until relatively recently to be one of the highly important small group of Rembrandt studies of the female nude, this exceptional drawing is now believed to be a rare work by Aert de Gelder, the very last of Rembrandt’s many illustrious pupils, who studied with the master around 1661-63.  Despite this reattribution, it remains one of the most sensitive, atmospheric and moving drawings of a female nude produced in 17^th-century Holland, and is also a tour de force of expressive linear economy and dramatic tonal contrasts, which gives it an almost Oriental contemplative power.  

One cannot generalise about any aspect of Rembrandt’s artistic vision, so although relatively few of his paintings incorporate prominent female nudes, it would be incorrect to say that this subject was of no interest to him.  On the occasions when he did make a nude female figure the focus of his composition, whether in an early painting such as Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, or in his monumental late masterpiece, Bathsheba reading King David’s Letter, he explores the expressive possibilities of the nude figure to the full, both as regards the narrative and in purely visual terms. 

In the graphic arts, Rembrandt made several prints of female nudes in the 1630s, after which they appear only as needed within larger subjects; the nude reappears, however, as the autonomous subject of a number of prints made during the final decade of the artist’s life.  In drawings, even though a number of Rembrandt’s pupils of the 1630s and ‘40s, such as Govert Flinck and Jacob Backer, drew extensively from the nude, and we know that life classes took place in Rembrandt’s studio, almost all the significant nude drawings by the master himself were made during the late 1650s or the 1660s.  These late nudes include some of Rembrandt’s greatest drawings, and it is not surprising that the cover image on the catalogue of the Getty Museum’s seminal 2009-10 exhibition, Drawings by Rembrandt and his Pupils, Telling the Difference, was the great study of a seated nude woman, now in the Art Institute of Chicago.¹ 

The Chicago drawing was singularly appropriate for that exhibition catalogue cover not only because it is one of Rembrandt’s greatest drawings, but also because there exists a second drawing of the same figure (in the Koenigs Collection at the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam), clearly made during the course of the same life-drawing session but from a slightly different viewpoint, which was long held to be an original work by Rembrandt, but has more recently been universally accepted instead as the work of Aert de Gelder.²  Peter Schatborn’s careful analysis of the two drawings in the Getty exhibition catalogue effectively clarifies the stylistic differences between them³, and he has applied similar analytical techniques to separate the various drawings that were once all thought to be late Rembrandt drawings of nudes into three main groups, which he convincingly attributes to Rembrandt, Aert de Gelder, and another late Rembrandt pupil, Johannes Raven.⁴  In essence, the drawings that Schatborn gives to De Gelder, which include others in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and in Dresden, are characterised by a rather different approach to modelling and structure than we see in Rembrandt’s drawings of nudes, resulting in a less three-dimensional, slightly more abstract overall effect, which on occasions seems almost oriental in its simplicity of form.⁵  The drawings given to Johannes Raven are generally much less accomplished.

Attributions to both De Gelder and Raven involve a certain amount of extrapolation, as we have only one documentary drawing by De Gelder on which to base his entire drawn oeuvre (the study of a group of men in Middle Eastern costumes, in the Abrams collection⁶), and attributions to Raven are based on an single inscription on the back of one of these nudes.⁷  Yet all the same, the stylistic groupings are indisputable, and the arguments for accepting the specific attributions of the two groups that are not by Rembrandt are also extremely convincing.  In every respect, the present drawing, with its somewhat more careful line work, broad flat background washes, and resultant striking tonal contrasts, fits with the group of drawings that Schatborn gives to De Gelder⁸, although the distinctive surface effects are here perhaps even more accentuated due to the fact that this drawing, unlike any of the others, is executed on vellum.       

Although De Gelder lived long, his drawings are extremely rare, and hardly any of them remain in private hands.  And although he painted for many years after Rembrandt’s death, the great majority of his few surviving drawings appear to date from his period of study in Rembrandt’s studio.  This drawing, in which de Gelder approaches so close to his master in terms both of technique and of relationship with his subject, is a powerful witness to Rembrandt’s extraordinarily reduced approach to drawing at this late stage of his career, and also to how much of his master’s brilliant technique and penetrating visual sense de Gelder absorbed and reinterpreted. 

This serenely beautiful drawing has, understandably, been appreciated by a series of great collectors, from the Earl of Warwick through Robert von Hirsch to John Gaines, and was purchased by the present owner at the 1986 sale of the latter’s collection.  A deceptively simple and deeply contemplative image, the drawing in some ways reflects not only Rembrandt’s studies of nudes but also his famous series of copies after Mughal miniatures.  Here de Gelder rises to an expressive level that he rarely equalled in his other surviving drawings.

1.  The Art Institute of Chicago, Clarence Buckingham Collection, inv. 1953.38; O. Benesch, op. cit., no. 1122

2.  Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Koenigs Collection, inv. R 1; Benesch, op. cit., no. 1121

3.  Drawings by Rembrandt and his Pupils, telling the difference, exh. cat., Los Angeles, the J. Paul Getty Museum, pp. 236-239, cat. nos. 40.1 and 40.2

4.  Peter Schatborn, 'Rembrandt's late drawings of femal nudes,' in Drawings Defined, New York 1987, pp. 307-319

5.  Benesch, op. cit., nos. 1109, 1118

6.  The Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston, on loan to the Harvard University Art Museum/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, inv. 25.1998.123; W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, vol. 5, New York 1981, no. 1052; Drawings by Rembrandt and his Pupils, telling the difference, cat. no. 39.2

7.  Sumowski, op. cit., vol. 9, New York 1985, no. 2141; see also, Drawings by Rembrandt and his Pupils, telling the difference, pp. 240-49.

8.  We are very grateful to Peter Schatborn, who has studied this drawing in the original, for confirming the attribution to Aert de Gelder.