Jan van de Velde II

With Jocelyn Feilding Fine Art Ltd, London, from whom acquired in 1982 by
Maida and George Abrams, Boston

Boston, Museum of Fine Arts, 2000 (a selection of drawings from the Abrams Collection, no catalogue)

Remains of glue from old mounting visible in one or two places, verso. Landscape with a tower has two very minor thin spots in the paper. Both drawings have some surface flecks of what appears to be white gouache in various places, but are otherwise in good, fresh condition. Mounted together, and sold in a black wood, Dutch style frame.
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Around 1615-16, Jan van de Velde and his cousin Esaias both made a number of highly refined and very original landscape sketches, executed in pen and brown ink on an unusual rose-tinted paper, which are all the same size and probably originate from a single sketchbook, used by both artists.  Although these drawings do to some extent still reflect the mannerist traditions of artists such as Goltzius and de Gheyn, in their strikingly naturalistic approach to the landscape and great technical sophistication they stand as something of a landmark, in many ways defining the moment of emergence of the 17th-century Dutch landscape tradition, which was to be spearheaded by Jan van de Velde's illustrious pupil, Jan van Goyen.

The present drawings must both originate from another sketchbook, similar in overall size but somewhat narrower in format: the sheets, which do not seem to have been cut down, are the same height as the rose-tinted sketches, but some 25 mm narrower.  Apart from the absence of the coloured wash preparation, the sweeping, calligraphic penwork and overall approach to the landscape and the figures are very comparable to some of the rose-tinted sketches that are generally thought to be by Jan, rather than Esaias, van de Velde, such as the rugged mountain scene in Gottingen, or the Landscape with a Mill and a Farm, in the Albertina, Vienna.¹  There are also notable stylistic similarities with another pair of landscape drawings by Jan, also in the Albertina, where the artist has employed a more exaggeratedly panoramic format (101 x 315 mm).²

^1. J.G. van Gelder, Jan van de Velde, 's-Gravenhage 1933, pp. 86, 89, nos. 45, 71, reproduced figs. 54 and 52, respectively

^2. Inv. nos. 1083, 1084; M. Bisanz-Prakken, Drawings from the Albertina, Landscape in the Age of Rembrandt, exhib. cat., New York, The Drawing Center, and Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 1995, pp. 64-65, nos. 21-22