Jan van Call the Elder

A. Kuys, Amersfoort, 1956

Jan van Call is one of the most distinctive Dutch topographical draughtsmen of the second half of the 17th Century.  His airy, colourful landscapes are rather rare outside of museum collections; hardly a dozen of his drawings have appeared on the market in the last twenty-five years, and just one similar, circular view of the Rhine¹ (though two more are in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam²). 

A volume of his working sketches, containing some thirty-five views of cities along the Rhine and the Main, was sold, London, Sotheby's, 2-3 May 1985 (Atlases, Travel and Topography), lot 170, and a set of nineteen similar views was engraved, either by the artist or by his son of the same name, and published in Amsterdam by Petrus Schenk (Hollstein 1478-1496; undated).

Van Call also made substantial numbers of drawings of more far-flung locations, the product of extensive travels that he made between about 1672 and 1683, in the company of the Nijmegen scholar and part-time printmaker Johannes Teyler, to Germany, France, Italy and apparently also the Middle East.³ 

The more rugged of these two views depicts Bacharach. A coloured print by Teyler, based on the drawing, is in the British Museum⁴, and a broader version of the same composition was included in Schenk's series of engraved Rhine views after Van Call.  The second location depicted may be Emmerich.

^1.  Sold, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 16 November 2005, lot 81

^2.  Inv. nos. 1921-6, 1921-7; see K. Honnef et al, Vom Zauber des Rheins Ergriffen, exh. cat., Cologne/Bonn 1992, pp. 166-7, 327, nos. 1-2

^3.  See, for example, the two Middle Eastern views, sold, London, Sotheby's, 3 July 2013, lots 139 and 140

^4.  Inv. 1871,1209.5089