Abraham Jansz. van Diepenbeeck

This lively and animated drawing belonged to one of history's finest and most renowned collectors, Pierre Jean Mariette (1694-1774), who also owned a remarkable, early wash drawing by the artist, a design for a print representing St. Paul Dictating at Ephesus, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.¹ Though not, apparently, indented for transfer to the engraver's plate, the subject, format and scale of the present drawing suggest it too may have been made as a design for a print. 

For another drawing by Van Diepenbeeck, see lot 19.

^1. Inv. no. 1981.289; Saskia van Altena, '"Rubens's most truthful follower": Abraham van Diepenbeeck as a Draftsman,' Master Drawings, vol. 58, no. 4 (Winter 2020), p. 504, reproduced fig. 17