JAN JOSEFSZ. VAN GOYEN | VIEW ALONG A ROAD TOWARDS A VILLAGE, WITH TREES TO THE LEFT

General George Catchmade Morgan,

thence by descent to his daughter, Sophia Pollard;

with P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., London, in 1976;

sale, Amsterdam, Christie's, 26 November 1984, lot 79, reproduced pl. 26,

purchased by Albin Schram, Lausanne,

by inheritance to the present owners

H.-U. Beck, Jan van Goyen, vol. III, supplement, Doornspijk 1987, p. 118, no. 844A/7;

C.P. van Eeghen, 'Jan van Goyen's Early Chalk Landscapes from Two Albums,' in Master Drawings, XXXV, no. 2 (Summer 1997), p. 179, n. 8

This sketch originates from an album known as the Catchmade Morgan Album which, when Dr. Beck studied it in 1977, contained some 67 chalk drawings, mounted and bound together, prior to the album being broken up around 1978. Dr. Beck accepted the drawings that he saw in the Catchmade Morgan Album as original works by Van Goyen, dating them to around 1627-29, but rejected a further 9 sheets which had already been removed from the album by that time. More recently, though, C.P. van Eeghen has proposed that all the drawings originally contained in the album were in fact by Van Goyen, those rejected by Beck being the earliest known chalk studies by the artist, dating from around 1623-4, and the others being slightly later in date, but in any case executed no later than 1626-7. 

Beck and van Eeghen agree that the drawings in this group represent views near Leiden, where Van Goyen was living at the time.

Albin Schram (1926-2005) was a voracious but discerning collector of works on paper and autograph documents. The story goes that his fascination with these records of human interactions and artistic creation was sparked when his mother presented him with a romantic letter written by Napoleon Bonaparte to his future wife Josephine de Beauharnais in an attempt to patch up an argument. The superb collection of late 19th and early 20th century works on paper from the Schram collection, including drawings by artists such as Camille Pissarro, Edgar Degas, August Macke, Emil Nolde and Alfred Kubin, was sold at Sotheby's last month, under the title: The Artist's Sketchbook: Where Inspiration finds Form.