Jan Harmensz. Muller

As Bill Robinson so elegantly described (see Literature), this previously unidentified drawing is both a characteristic example of the style of the Mannerist draughtsman and printmaker Jan Harmensz. Muller, and a work that sheds interesting new light on his working method.

With its old attribution to Hendrick Goltzius on the backing, the sheet certainly originates from the fertile artistic milieu of circa 1600 Haarlem, but it is not by Goltzius. Both the physiognomy of the figures and the details of handling, with bold outlines in pen and ink in the main figures combined with much more fleeting indications of less important details, are typical of the work of Goltzius’s gifted follower, and perhaps pupil, Jan Harmensz. Muller. The muscular back of Hercules in particular is close in style to similar male figures seen from behind, in drawings such as the Apollo and Daphne, in Brussels, or the Hagar in the Desert, Consoled by an Angel, in the Louvre.¹ 

Those drawings – the latter of them the study for an engraving – are, however, much more fully worked up and completed than the Slive drawing, which is a rare, if not unique, example within Muller’s work of an initial thought or exploratory sketch. It must, though, date from around the same time, circa 1590, as those and other more elaborate drawings by the artist.

The subject, seen here in two simultaneous episodes, is the story of how the centaur Nessus, having offered to carry Hercules’s wife Dejaniera across the treacherous waters of the river Euneus, tried to rape her while Hercules was distracted by his own efforts to cross the river. When they all arrived safely on the other side, Hercules shot Nessus dead with an arrow for what he had done.

1.  Brussels, De Grez Collection, in. 40060/67; Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. 19286