Lambert Harmensz. Doomer

Possibly Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726-1798), Amsterdam (c.f. L.3004);
in the possession of the von Hammerstein-Loxton family for at least the last 120 years

Hinged along top edge, with brown paper tape, to old (19th-century?) backing. Foxing throughout. Repaired loss, top right corner, and thin spot top centre. Sold in a modern giltwood frame.
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Doomer's great series of large, topographical drawings, mainly depicting locations in France, Germany and his native Netherlands, constitute a distinctive chapter in 17th-century Dutch landscape art.  The artist's German journey postdated by nearly two decades his better known trip along the Loire valley and elsewhere in France.¹ He appears to have travelled up the Rhine around 1663, making numerous drawings of what he saw on the way.  In the 1670s, some years after his return to Amsterdam, he made quite a number of repetitions, versions and variants of those travel drawings, presumably for sale to collectors such as the famous Amsterdam merchant Laurens van der Hem, who assembled one of the greatest collections of topographical drawings and prints of its time.²  

This grand view of Hammerstein is executed in the free, energetic style typical of the drawings that Doomer actually made on his travels.  The paper also bears the same watermark as a fine view of Mönchengladbach, freely drawn in black chalk and watercolour, which was surely made 'on the road'.³  A version of this view of Hammerstein in a German private collection, slightly smaller than this and with different staffage, has been described, with good reason, by Schulz and Sumowski, as an autograph 1670s replica of a lost drawing of 1663.⁴ It seems very likely that the present sheet is that lost drawing.

Doomer's fine topographical drawings have been avidly collected, ever since the 17th century. Major groups, including the 1670s replica of the present sheet, belonged to the Amsterdam collectors Jeronimus Tonneman and Cornelis Ploos van Amstel, the latter of whom may well also have owned our drawing (an inscription in the same hand as one of those seen here on the verso, on the Lugt Collection view of Boppard on the Rhine, has been described as being Ploos's).⁵  The main inscription, identifying the location depicted, is also in a hand that is often seen on the reverse of Doomer's drawings, but one that so far remains unidentified.⁶  

^1. So fulsomely published by Stijn Alsteens and Hans Buijs, Paysages de France, dessinées par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVI^e et XVII^esiècles, Paris 2008

^2. See Een wereldreiziger op Papier, De atlas van Laurens van der Hem (1621-1678), exh. cat., Amsterdam, Paleis op de Dam, 1992

^3. Inv. 5841; Peter Schatborn, Rembrandt and his Circle, Drawings in the Frits Lugt Collection, 2 vols., Bussum/Paris 2010, pp. 140-143, cat. 46

^4. W. Schulz, Lambert Doomer, Sämtliche Zeichnungen, Berlin/New York 1974, p. 95, no. 224; W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, New York 1979, vol. 2, p. 871, no. 15.

^5. Inv. 2229, Schatborn, op. cit., cat. 49

^6. Also on e.g. the Lugt Collection drawing, In the Dunes near Bergen (Inv. 2227, Schatborn, op. cit., cat. 53)