Leonaert Bramer

This drawing and the following lot belong to a substantial series of large drawings by Bramer, all executed in the same spare but attractive black chalk technique, which record the compositions of paintings that were being auctioned from prominent Delft collections around 1652-53. As Michiel Plomp described in his thorough publication on this group of drawings, the majority of which are contained in an album in the Rijksmuseum, Bramer inscribed the drawings with the name of the painter whose works he was recording; some of the prototypes have been identified, some not. Confusingly, in this case, the painting was actually by Bramer himself, and it was one of at least three very similar compositions by the artist that he recorded in this way, the paintings presumably making up a set of decorative canvases of a type that would have been unusual in mid-17th century Dutch art. We know, however, that Bramer participated in the decorations of the palaces of Rijswijk and Honselaarsdijk, and later, in 1668-9, he painted a dramatic rather Italianate ceiling in Delft's Prinsenhof - perhaps, as Plomp suggests, drawing inspiration from the works of Paolo Veronese and other Italian masters that he had seen when in Rome, Mantua and Venice, much earlier in his career. 

One of the other related drawings showing The Gods on Mount Olympus, numbered 14, is in a Dutch private collection, and another, numbered 17, is in the Prentenkabinet of the Rijksuniversiteit Leiden (inv. AW 5443); it is reasonable to assume that there was once a fourth painting, and a corresponding drawing, numbered 16.