Govaert Flinck

Possibly St. J. Dent (L.1438) (according to the 1970 sale catalogue);

R. Gummow,

sale, London, Christie's, 23 June 1970, lot 90 (as attributed to Rembrandt);

sale, London, Christie's, 9 December 2015, lot 90 (as attributed to Willem Drost);

Private collection, England;

sale, New York, Sotheby's, Old Master Drawings including the Collection of Professor Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, 31 January 2018, lot 244,

Private collection, France

Though until fairly recently associated with the name of Willem Drost, this drawing is in fact totally consistent with a group of early figure studies by Govert Flinck, assembled and published by Peter Schatborn¹, and this attribution is accepted by the current scholars of drawings of the Rembrandt school with a unanimity that is rarely encountered in the complicated field of Rembrandt studies. Especially comparable in their approach to hatching and physiognomy are a study of an Old Man Seated, in Melbourne, which bears a very early attribution to Flinck on the verso, a double-sided sheet in Dijon, and the impressive drawing of Gideon and the Angel, in the Abrams Collection.²  

Flinck was one of the most accomplished draughtsmen of all Rembrandt's pupils, and also had a highly successful career, cut short by his sudden death at the age of only 45. He studied with Rembrandt for one year, probably in 1635-36, shortly after Rembrandt had set himself up as an independent master in Amsterdam. Arnold Houbraken, the chronicler of artists' lives, tells us that Flinck absorbed his master’s manner so successfully that some of his pictures were mistaken for authentic Rembrandts and sold as such, but that after leaving Rembrandt’s studio, he deliberately sought to change his style. 

This drawing and the others in the same style all show a considerable debt to Rembrandt's drawing style of the mid-1630s, and Schatborn therefore considers them early works, executed either while Flinck was training with Rembrandt or very soon thereafter.

1. P. Schatborn, 'The Early, Rembrandtesque Drawings of Govert Flinck', in Master Drawings, vol. XLVIII, no. 1, 2010, pp. 4-38
2. Ibid., pp. 11-13, 22-25, figs. 11, 22 & 23; P.C. Sutton & W.W. Robinson, Drawings by Rembrandt, his Students and Circle from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat., Greenwich, CT, Bruce Museum, 2011-12, pp. 80-83, cat. no. 22