View of an Encampment of the Army of Willem III

watermark: none

Some thinner spots scattered throughout the sheet; brown stain upper left

…; collection Jonkheer Victor Eugène Louis de Stuers (1843-1916), The Hague, from whom, to the museum (L. 2228), together with 14 other drawings, fl. 95:60:- for all, 1898

ObjectNumber: RP-T-1898-A-3769

This drawing is likely a copy after one of Josua de Grave’s drawings of the encampments of the Dutch army during their 1675 campaign to Walloon Brabant and Henegouwen (a province of Walloon and Belgium). The Rijksmuseum’s collection includes twenty-four of drawings by De Grave of this campaign, but also a handful of possible copies (e.g. inv. nos. RP-T-1898-A-3770, RP-T-00-132, RP-T-00-140, RP-T-00-141 and RP-T-00-144). The whereabouts of the original drawing after which the present sheet was drawn are unknown. While the composition and subject-matter mimic the formulaic approach by De Grave (placing a group of tents with figures and horses in front of a group of trees in a landscape), the execution is different. The copyist outlined the composition in graphite and finished the drawing with grey ink and minimal washes, this in contrast to De Grave, who predominantly used brown ink for his outlines for this series.

Carolyn Mensing, 2021

C. Mensing, 2021, 'anonymous, View of an Encampment of the Army of Willem III, 1675 - 1725', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.51935