Joachim Anthonisz. Wtewael

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN This drawing is in an exceptional condition considering its age and probably due to its having been laid down onto a mounting early in its life. Support It is difficult to determine this but there are indications that the drawing is probably laid down onto another sheet of laid paper and then supported by a 17th or 18th Century mount. The condition of the primary sheet of 17th Century laid paper is good only the corners have suffered, the upper left one having the greatest loss, visible in the illustration. The lower left has some creasing which may be original to the papers fabrication, there are some small splits to this area as well. The corner has a tiny paper repair. As does the lower right. Pin holes are visible lower and upper right. The verso of the mount shows time staining. Medium The mixed ink medium with washes is almost perfect. There is some slight abrasion in the dark wash below the top edge upper right. Also there is probably a little fading in the brown ink. The upper left corner is crudely touched in onto another paper which maybe laid fully behind the primary sheet. CONSERVATION NOTE As this drawing has survived is such a good condition for so long on the present mounting I would advise that it is left on the mount. However, it would be possible for a paper conservator to manually remove the drawing from the mount. JANE McAUSLAND, FIIC, ACR 14th June 2017
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Previously unrecorded, this excitingly drawn, fully signed depiction of a fish market is an extremely important addition to the very small number of known drawings by the brilliantly talented early 17th-century Utrecht artist Joachim Wtewael.  Wtewael has long been recognised as one of the most individual and gifted Netherlandish painters of the first quarter of the 17^th century, but his drawings are far less well known or studied, presumably on account of their great rarity.¹  Though opinions vary regarding the exact proportion of drawings associated with his name that can legitimately be considered autograph works by Wtewael himself, rather than copies or studio replicas, the highest suggested number is in the low sixties, and most modern scholars would only accept a maximum of around thirty drawings as original works by the artist.  This makes the emergence of this previously unknown drawing all the more significant, particularly since it is compositionally unique within the artist’s corpus of known works, painted or drawn, adding an entirely new dimension to our understanding of his draughtsmanship.² 

The drawing shows an animated scene of a fish market, with figures in both the foreground and the background handling and preparing fish in all sorts of different ways.  The scene fits into a tradition of market scenes that began at least half a century earlier, in the innovative paintings of Pieter Aertsen and Joachim Beuckelaer.  Wtewael himself also occasionally painted scenes of this type, but following the examples of Aertsen and Beuckelaer, he almost always placed a smaller representation of a religious scene (the ‘real’ subject of his painting) in the background, in the established tradition of Mannerist inversion.  One such painting is the grand Kitchen Scene with the Parable of the Great Supper, of 1605, in which we see in the foreground an elaborate kitchen scene, including a man preparing fish, his chopper raised in a pose very similar to that seen in the present drawing (fig. 1);³ but all the while the viewer is also very aware of the more significant events taking place in the background, highlighted, even, by the emphasis on fish, with all their Christian symbolism, in the foreground.  Only a tiny handful of Wtewael’s paintings, such as the Fruit and Vegetable Market of c. 1618, in the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, depict such market or kitchen scenes in isolation.⁴ 

In technical terms, this impressive, large drawing is particularly interesting.  The main forms are drawn with a fine pen in brown ink, and then the whole composition is elaborated and developed in a variety of media: pen and black ink, grey and black washes, and white gouache heightening.  The composition is very complete, yet thanks to the varied techniques the artist has used, also very lively.  It is fully signed in a form that appears on several of the artist’s drawings, the most closely comparable signatures being on a 1608 design for a salt cellar, in the British Museum⁵, and on the only dated drawing from the highly important series representing an Allegory of the Dutch Revolt (also known as The Netherlandish History series), the scene of The Twelve Years’ Truce (1612), in the Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston.⁶  In compositional ambition, technical originality, and sheer accomplishment in terms of handling, this newly discovered Fish Market can also be compared with the rather later (1622) drawing in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem, representing one of the artist’s favourite subjects, The Marriage of Peleus and Thetis, which has been described, with justification, as ‘arguably his most accomplished work on paper.’⁷ 

Whether a drawing such as this was made as the design for a painting or print, as a ricordo of a painting, or as an independent work of art remains unclear, and Stijn Alsteens, writing in the catalogue of the recent Wtewael exhibition held in Washington, Utrecht and Houston, says that without a greater understanding than we currently have of the artist’s working method, these questions are likely to remain unanswered.  Though relatively few of Wtewael’s drawings survive, in several cases we have multiple versions of the same composition, of subtly varied style and quality, all of which have been at times accepted as autograph.  In this case, though, apart from the very weak, and apparently previously unnoted, copy of the present drawing in Braunschweig, no other version, painted or drawn, is known.

The first quarter of the seventeenth century was a particularly rich moment in the history of drawing in the northern Netherlands, a period that saw the flourishing of masters such as Goltzius, de Gheyn, Bloemaert and Esaias van de Velde.  Joachim Wtewael was certainly no lesser draughtsman than any of those artists, but with the exception of a handful of drawings such as the Allegory of the Dutch Revolt series, his extremely rare works on paper remain very little known.  Perhaps the discovery of this outstanding drawing, very different in composition from any of the artist’s other surviving drawings, yet totally consistent with his style, will help to rectify this undeserved obscurity.  

^1. Stijn Alsteens’s essay, ‘Wtewael as Draftsman’, in the recent exhibition catalogue, Pleasure and Piety. The Art of Joachim Wtewael, exh. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art/Utrecht, Centraal Museum/Houston, Museum of Fine Arts, 2015-16, pp. 49-59, was the first attempt at a full account of the artist's drawings since the 1929 monograph by Lindemann.

^2. A weak copy of the drawing is in fact in Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Inv Z. 1656, held under Wtewael’s name, but even so, it does not seem to have been suggested anywhere in the literature that the artist ever treated this theme.

^3. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie, inv. 2002; A.W. Lowenthal, Joachim Wtewael and Dutch Mannerism, Doornspijk 1986, no. A-38; Exh. cat. Washington, op. cit., no. 23

^4. Lowenthal, op. cit., no. A-73. Another is a Game Market, c 1610-15, location unknown, Lowenthal no. A-57

^5. Inv 1872,1012.3322; Exh. cat. Washington, op. cit., no. 44

^6. Exh. cat. Washington, op. cit., no. 49.  See also W.W. Robinson, Bruegel to Rembrandt, Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat., London, British Museum/Paris, Institut Néerlandais/Cambridge, Massachusetts, Fogg Art Museum, 2002-3, no. 27

^7. Alsteens, in exh. cat. Washington, op. cit., p. 53; Ibid., cat. no. 54