watermark: Strasbourg lily, with letters WR (fragment); cf. Heawood, no. 1796 (Schieland: 1616), counter mark bR

probably commissioned by Laurens van der Hem (1621-1678), Amsterdam; ? his sale, Amsterdam (H. and T. Boom), 18 April 1684, Album V, in no. 19 (‘Verscheyde Gesighten van Vrankrijk op Atlas pampier’); …; ? sale, Hendrik van der Vught (1675-1744, Dordrecht), Amsterdam (B. de Bosch), 17 April 1745, Album 12; …; ? sale, Hendrik Tersmitten jr, Heer van Spaland (1709-1753, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (J. de Bary et al.), 23 September 1754 sqq., in Album V, to Gabriel Huquier I (1695-1772), Paris;¹¹According to Bolten 1967, p. 86 his sale, Paris, 1 July 1771 sqq., in no. 46, or in no. 47; …; collection Chevalier Jean Louis Antoine le Vaillant de Damery (1723-1803), Paris (L. 2862); …; sale, Berlin (Süddeutscher Kunstfreund), 8 June 1896, no. 456; …; sale, René Jacques della Faille de Waerloos (1830-1902, Antwerp), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 19 January 1904, no. 253, fl. 26, to the dealer J.H. Odink, Amsterdam, from whom, with 190 other drawings, fl. 1,000.00 for all, through mediation of Vereniging Rembrandt, to the museum (L. 2228), 1905

Object number: RP-T-1905-85

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

This impressive view of a waterfall is located in the Chartreuse Mountains, a mountain massif north of Grenoble, as is stated by the inscription of the topographical collector Laurens van der Hem. The present sheet must have been part of his collection and was probably made on his commission.²²S. Alsteens and H. Buijs, Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris 2008, p. 291. The drawing is not dated but was done on Dutch paper. Other comparable large views by De Moucheron of the region, such as View of the Isère Valley near Grenoble in the National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh (inv. no. RSA 83), were drawn on French paper with a watermark of circa 1654.³³Ibid., p. 297 (fig. c). That may point to a later date for the present drawing, especially since it differs stylistically from one of his few dated drawings from that series, the Landscape near the Grand Chartreuse of 1656 in the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg (inv. no. 22204).⁴⁴A. Stefes, Niederländische Zeichnungen, 1450-1800, 3 vols., coll. cat. Hamburg 2011 (Die Sammlungen der Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett, vol. 2), no. 692. Moreover, since it is stylistically related to De Moucheron’s Roman Castle of Francheville), dated 1669, in the famous Atlas of Laurens van der Hem in the Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna (vol. 1, no. 4:29, fol. 65-66), it may have been drawn more than ten years after the artist’s return from France.⁵⁵Suggested by ibid., p. 297. A similar signature, with the artist’s name likewise spelled ‘Frederico’, is found on an undated drawing in the Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris, the Bridge at Chaponost (inv. no. 9334).⁶⁶Ibid., no. 87.

Not all of the drawings commissioned by Van der Hem made it into his 50-volume atlas now in Vienna. That atlas – an expanded version of the ‘Great Atlas’ (‘Atlas Maior’) by Joan Blaeu (Amsterdam 1660/63) – was assembled by Van der Hem between 1662 and 1678, with drawings and maps of his own choice. The section on France is illustrated by eight large drawings by De Moucheron. Curiously, however, none of these depicts the Chartreuse region.⁷⁷Cf. ibid., p. 296. On the other hand, an album of thirty-two drawings by De Moucheron of that region is described in the auctions of Hendrik van der Vught (1745) and Hendrik Tersmitten (1754), respectively.⁸⁸The album was first mentioned by J. Bolten, Dutch Drawings from the Collection of Dr C. Hofstede de Groot, Utrecht 1967, pp. 86-87, under no. 52. Today, these drawings, including most probably the present sheet, are dispersed.⁹⁹The list, commenced by Bolten in ibid., p. 87 (n. 7), was continued by K. Andrews, Catalogue of Netherlandish Drawings in the National Gallery of Scotland, 2 vols., coll. cat. Edinburgh 1985, I, pp. 55-56, by E. de Groot, The World of a Seventeenth-Century Collector: The Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem, ‘t Goy-Houten 2006, p. 132 (n. 38) and by S. Alsteens and H. Buijs, Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris 2008, p. 300 (n. 32). As many of these sheets also bear annotations by Van der Hem, it is assumed that the whole group was once in his collection.¹⁰¹⁰It is tempting to identify the ‘Van der Vugt/Tersmitten-Album’ as part of lot 19, p. 83, in Van der Hem’s sale of 1684; cf. E. de Groot, The World of a Seventeenth-Century Collector: The Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem, ‘t Goy-Houten 2006, p. 110, and S. Alsteens and H. Buijs, Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris 2008, p. 296. Why Van der Hem did not include some such sheets in his atlas is unknown, especially since in the seventeenth century the Chartreuse mountains was particularly popular with travellers.

Annemarie Stefes, 2019

K. Andrews, Catalogue of Netherlandish Drawings in the National Gallery of Scotland, 2 vols., coll. cat. Edinburgh 1985, I, p. 55; E. de Groot, The World of a Seventeenth-Century Collector: The Atlas Blaeu-Van der Hem, ‘t Goy-Houten 2006, p. 132 (n. 38); S. Alsteens and H. Buijs, Paysages de France dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Paris 2008, pp. 291, 296-97, no. 88; A. Stefes, Niederländische Zeichnungen, 1450-1800, 3 vols., coll. cat. Hamburg 2011 (Die Sammlungen der Hamburger Kunsthalle, Kupferstichkabinett, vol. 2), II, p. 394, under no. 692 (n. 2)

A. Stefes, 2025, 'Frederik de Moucheron, Waterfall in the Chartreuse Mountains, Amsterdam, c. 1669', in J. Turner (ed.), (under construction) Drawings 2, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200142860