拍品 114
  • 114

ATTRIBUTED TO REMBRANDT VAN RIJN | Cottages along Sloterweg, outside Amsterdam

估價
30,000 - 50,000 GBP
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描述

  • Cottages along Sloterweg, outside Amsterdam
  • Pen and brown ink and later, added grey and brown wash
  • 107 by 190 mm

來源

Sir Thomas Lawrence (1769-1830), London (L.2445);
William Esdaile (1758-1837), London (L.2617, verso; with his inscription, verso1835 WE);
J. P. Heseltine;
sale, Amsterdam, Muller/Mensing, 15-16 June 1926 (Comte de Robiano collection, Brussels, et al), lot 440, reproduced

出版

O. Benesch, Rembrandt, Werk und Forschung, Vienna 1935, p.48;
Idem, The Drawings of Rembrandt, rev. ed., 6 vols., London 1973, vol. 6, no. 1286, reproduced fig. 1590;
E. Starcky, Rembrandt et son école, dessins du Musée du Louvre, exhib. cat., Paris, Louvre, 1988-89, p. 59, under no. 49;
C. Schneider, Rembrandt's Landscapes, Drawings and Prints, exhib. cat., Washington, National Gallery of Art, 1990, p. 111, n.5, under no. 19;
B. Bakker, M. van Berge-Gerbaud, E. Schmitz and J. Peters, Landscapes of Rembrandt. His favourite walks, exhib. cat., Amsterdam, Gemeentearchief, and Paris, Fondation Custodia, 1998-9, p. 342, n.5

Condition

Hinged to mount along top edge. Remains of further old hinges attached to verso in all four corners. Light stains from these old hinges visible on recto in both right corners. Light vertical crease down right edge. Sheet lightly foxed throughout, and with a little surface dirt, but ink good and strong. Please note this lot is sold unframed.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

拍品資料及來源

This intriguing study of farm buildings amongst trees, rapidly executed in fine pen and brown ink and worked up in broad grey and brown washes, seems in many ways a definitive example of one of Rembrandt’s spontaneous studies of the numerous humble farms and other buildings that lay amid the fields and polders surrounding Amsterdam.  Yet at the same time, this sheet highlights some of the key issues and dilemmas faced by scholars of Rembrandt’s drawings.    Exactly the same location is shown, from a viewpoint slightly more to the right, in a drawing in the Edmond de Rothschild Collection at the Louvre, and also, from closer up, in another drawing in Stockholm.1  It is a typical Rembrandt subject: a humble and seemingly anonymous farm amongst trees.  Yet as long ago as the beginning of the 20th century, the young Frits Lugt realised that Rembrandt’s drawings of this type actually depicted, very faithfully, the buildings and views that he saw along the routes of a number of walks that he seems to have made on a regular basis, out from Amsterdam into the surrounding fields and polders.  In his extraordinary publication of 1915, Wandelingen met Rembrandt in en om Amsterdam (‘Walks with Rembrandt in and around Amsterdam’), Lugt sought to define the routes that Rembrandt walked, and identify as many as he could of the locations that he passed, as depicted in the artist’s surviving landscape drawings and prints. 

This quest was revisited in the brilliant exhibition created by the Amsterdam Archives and the Lugt Collection (Fondation Custodia) Paris, in 1998 (see Literature), when an extraordinary number of locations depicted in Rembrandt’s landscapes were newly identified, and his walks recreated with the actual drawings and prints that he made in these different spots.  It was then that Boudewijn Bakker and his fellow authors identified the farmstead seen in the present drawing, linking it with a 1666 drawing of the same location by Johannes Leupenius, in Rotterdam, which is inscribed op de wegh van Sloten (on the way from Sloten) J. Leupen 1666.2  The village of Sloten lay a little to the south-west of Amsterdam along a route that Rembrandt walked regularly (walk V, in Lugt’s Wandelingen…), leaving Amsterdam by the Heiligewegspoort, and continuing out along the Overtoomsevaart to Amstelveen and Sloten.

The fundamental question, though, that is posed by the existence of this drawing and the associated sheet in the Louvre is, did Rembrandt himself make both these drawings, either one after the other or on different visits to the same location, or were they made at one and the same moment, one by Rembrandt and one by a pupil or colleague, the two artists sitting beside one another?  Our judgement of the style of the drawing is complicated by the fact that the grey and brown washes were clearly added, at a later date, by another hand.  The Louvre drawing, which also belonged in the 19th century to the English collector William Esdaile, has rather similar added grey wash, but less of it, and the extent to which the wash distracts our stylistic judgement of the underlying pen drawing is correspondingly less.  While all agree that the drawing in the Louvre is by Rembrandt, scholarly opinions on the authorship of the pen and ink elements of the present drawing are divided.  Martin Royalton-Kisch feels that the handling of the pen in the two drawings is so similar that both should be attributed to Rembrandt.   Peter Schatborn and Holm Bevers, on the other hand, consider the idea of two artists sitting alongside each other to be more convincing, and Schatborn tends towards an attribution to Rembrandt’s pupil Pieter de With.3  Although there is no documentary record that De With actually studied with Rembrandt, he is generally believed to have done so, in the early 1650s – the dating assigned to this drawing by Benesch, when he published it as a Rembrandt.

Although the drawing is mentioned in passing in the 1998 exhibition catalogue (see Literature), the authors very reasonably observe that ‘the quality of the available reproduction does not encourage further comment on this sheet’.  But even with the benefit of a good image, all the scholars named above are at pains to point out that the landscapes sketches of this type pose some of the most difficult connoisseurship challenges in the entire field of the drawings by Rembrandt and his circle. 

The drawing remains, however, a fine and rare testament to Rembrandt’s unique and deeply spiritual engagement, during a period of a decade or so in the middle of his career, with the seemingly anonymous details of the landscape surrounding his home city of Amsterdam, details which this extraordinary corpus of drawings elevate from humble simplicity to the height of noble grandeur.

1.  Paris, Louvre, inv. no. 187 dR; Stockholm, Nationalmuseum, inv. 54/1919; Benesch, op.cit., 1973, nos. 1287 and 1289 respectively
2.  Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, inv. MB 192; W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, vol. 7, New York 1983, no. 1559
3.  For the most complete comparative analysis of the landscape drawings of Rembrandt and De With, see Drawings by Rembrandt and his Pupils, Telling the Difference, exhib. cat., Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009-10, pp. 216-225