Jacob van der Ulft

Sale, Paris, Artcurial, 24 September 2025, lot 477

Although Van der Ulft’s atmospheric brown wash drawings of Roman buildings and ruins, with their characteristic dazzling lighting, are very familiar, his fine gouaches are extremely rare. The majority of those that are known are much smaller in scale than the present example, conceived more as cabinet miniatures. The only other gouache by Van der Ulft similar in scale and ambition to the present work that has come to market in recent decades is the grand depiction of the Tower of Babel, formerly in the Bernard Breslauer Collection, which was sold in London in 2011.¹

^1.Sale, London, Sotheby’s, 7 July 2011, lot 21