Adriaen Jansz. van Ostade

Window mounted on a modern card support. There are some minor nicks to the upper, centre and lower left edge. There is some very minor discolouration to the lower left and right edge of the sheet. The medium remains in otherwise very good condition with the chalk fresh and vibrant throughout and the sheet retaining its vibrant blue colour. Sold in a carved darkwood frame.
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This spirited, double-sided sheet of figure studies epitomises how Ostade used rapid chalk studies of this type to develop figures and poses for use in his painted compositions.  See also the other two Ostade figure studies in the Haverkamp-Begemann Collection, lots 306 & 313 below. Dr. Bernhard Schnackenburg has kindly confirmed the attribution, and tells us that he believes this is a relatively early work, dating from the 1640s, the moment when Ostade really began to make chalk studies of this type on a regular basis.  In their dashing, rather angular handling, the studies on the recto in particular can be compared with drawings such as the studies of a violinist, in Hamburg, which the artist used for a dated painting of 1644.¹ The separate studies of a woman wiping a baby's bottom, of the baby, and of the woman's hand holding the cloth, illustrate very well how Ostade approached the development of his figures, and the details of his compositions.  The motif must relate to one of a number of paintings that he made representing the Sense of Smell, although no painting is currently known that contains this exact figure.

The less fully developed study on the verso, of a child standing beside a woman's knee, can, however be linked to a known painting, the 1661 Peasant Family in a Cottage Interior (fig. 1), in the collection of Eijk and Rosemarie van Otterloo, and recently promised by them to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  Whether Ostade made the study on the verso rather later than those on the recto, or reused an earlier motif when painting the van Otterloo panel, remains unclear, but the connection between painting and drawing is undeniable.  

^1.  Hamburg, Kunsthalle, inv. nr. 22 292; B. Schnackenburg, Adriaen van Ostade, Isack van Ostade, Zeichnungen und Aquarelle, 2 vols., Hamburg 1981, vol. I, pp. 22, 40, 89, no. 46, reproduced vol. II, pl. 25