Abraham Bloemaert

Sale, London, Sotheby’s, 3 July 2019, lot 353,

where acquired

Though the squaring would seem to indicate that this large and previously unknown compositional drawing by Bloemaert was made as the design for a painting, no corresponding work by the artist is known. Bloemaert's most important surviving treatment of this Old Testament subject is the spectacular painting of 1596, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, but the composition of that oil, a definitive work of Bloemaert's mannerist phase, is very different from that of the present drawing.¹ At least two other painted versions of the subject are believed to have existed², but both date from early in Bloemaert's career (1591 and 1611), whereas this serenely balanced drawing must surely be a much later work, most probably from the 1640s.  Bloemaert also made at least five other drawings depicting this subject, but again none of these are very close in composition to this newly discovered work.³ The three dated by Jaap Bolten to the 1640s⁴ are, though, more similar in approach than the artist's more mannered, earlier treatments of the theme.  

^1.Inv. 1972.171; M.G. Roethlisberger, Abraham Bloemaert and his Sons. Paintings and Prints, 2 vols., Doornspijk 1993, vol. I, pp. 92-3, no. 46, reproduced vol. II, colour plate IV, figs. 81-85

^2.Ibid., p. 93, under no. 46

^3.J.A. Bolten, Abraham Bloemaert. The Drawings, 2 vols., vol. I, nos. 39-42, reproduced vol. II, figs. 39a, 40, 41, 41a, 42 

^4.Ibid, nos. 41, 41a, 42