Gerrit Adriaensz. de Heer

With Otto Naumann, Ltd, New York;
sale, New York, Sotheby's, 28 January 2009, lot 128

The works of Gerrit de Heer and those of his son and pupil Willem, or Guillam, are frequently impossible to distinguish.  Willem appears to have signed some of his drawings W. de Heer and others G. de Heer, the same signature that his father used, and the stylistic differences between their works are subtle in the extreme.  Thus only those drawings signed W. de Heer, or dated in the 1630s or '40s, can be assigned to one or other artist with certainty.¹ 

The great majority of De Heer's known works depict lively scenes of peasant merry-making, and portraits by the artist are rare.  A pair, depicting Johannes Bogaert and his wife Maria Wijnands, are in Groningen, and indeed those two drawings, which are dated 1634, are amongst the small number that can be definitively attributed to Gerrit de Heer, rather than his son, who was not born until 1637/8.²  On the basis of comparison with the Groningen drawings, the present work can also be given to Gerrit, as can the only other portrait by the artist that has appeared on the market in recent years.³ 

^1. For further analysis of this problem, see Franklin W. Robinson, Dutch Drawings from the Abrams collection, exhib. cat., Wellesley, Mass., etc, 1969, under cat. no. 23.

^2. See J. Bolten, Dutch Drawings from the Collection of Dr. C. Hofstede de Groot, Utrecht 1967, cat. nos. 38 and 39, as Guillam de Heer

^3. Sold Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 10 November 1998, lot 49