Watermark: Lower part of a mark (a foolscap?) with three balls, above the letters, AD

Light foxing throughout, with a small area of discoloration of the paper in the upper left corner

…; collection Dr Albert Welcker (1884-1957), Amsterdam (L. 2793c); …; sale, Dr Hendrik Catharinus Valkema Blouw (1883-1953, Bodegraven), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 2 March 1954 sqq., no. 403 (as Jacob van Ruisdael), fl. 60, to the museum (L. 2228), 1954

Object number: RP-T-1954-98

Ever since the Valkema Blouw sale of 1954, the castle represented in this drawing – seen in the distance through a row of trees – has been identified as Bentheim Castle, located in the Saxon spa town just over the German border, some 20 km northeast of Enschede. Jacob van Ruisdael (1628/29-1682), to whom the sheet was traditionally attributed, probably visited Bentheim in 1650 or 1651, the date of the earliest of some dozen paintings of the site by the artist.¹¹On the subject of Bentheim Castle in Ruisdael’s oeuvre, see S. Slive et al., Jacob van Ruisdael, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis)/Cambridge (MA) (Fogg Art Museum) 1981-82, p. 51, under no. 12; S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: Master of Landscape, exh. cat. Los Angeles (Los Angeles County Museum of Art)/Philadelphia (Philadelphia Museum of Art)/London (Royal Academy of Art) 2005-06, pp. 23-41; and Q. Buvelot, Jacob van Ruisdael schildert Bentheim, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2009. For the paintings, see S. Slive et al., Jacob van Ruisdael, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis)/Cambridge (MA) (Fogg Art Museum) 1981-82, nos. 12-14; and N. Büttner and G. Unverfehrt, Jacob van Ruisdael in Bentheim: Ein niederländischer Maler und die Burg Bentheim im 17. Jahrhundert, Bielefeld 1993, pp. 103-06, nos. 1-29.

Curiously, however, there are no known drawings of this subject that can be securely given to Ruisdael. Of four possible examples catalogued by Büttner and Unverfehrt,²²Ibid., p. 106, nos. 30-33. they were certain of the attribution to Ruisdael of only one: a view of the castle from the south-east, formerly in the collection of George and Maida Abrams, Boston, and now in a Dutch private collection, Wassenaar. However, that drawing has since been reattributed to Ruisdael’s probable pupil Jan van Kessel (1641-1680), as was proposed in 2008 by Jeroen Giltaij in an e-mail to Quentin Buvelot.³³Q. Buvelot, Jacob van Ruisdael schildert Bentheim, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2009, p. 40 (fig. 37); S. Slive, Jacob van Ruisdael: A Complete Catalogue of his Paintings, Drawings and Etchings, New Haven 2001, no. dubD33. Two of the other three sheets are in the Kupferstich-Kabinett, Dresden (inv. nos. C 1979-108 and C 1134),⁴⁴Ibid., nos. dubD15 and dubD16. and the fourth is in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 2855).⁵⁵Ibid., no. dubD7. Slive listed all four sheets under his ‘dubious and wrongly attributed drawing’ section in his 2001 monograph on the artist.

In fact, neither the traditional attribution, nor the identification of the location can be sustained. The large, square eleventh-century keep – the Powder Tower (Pulverturm) – that dominates the skyline of the Bentheim building complex is missing, and the remains of the possibly original inscription, T Huys H[…], point to a different castle.⁶⁶Q. Buvelot, Jacob van Ruisdael schildert Bentheim, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2009, pp. 36-37 (fig. 28), did not question the identification of the site as Bentheim Castle.

The sheet might derive from a now lost or unknown sketchbook that has been dismantled,⁷⁷Ibid., p. 37. but the artist remains to be identified. It may be by the same artist (also formerly identified as Ruisdael) that was responsible for the museum’s Landscape with the Church of Sint Engelmundus, Driehuis, near Velsen (inv. no. RP-T-1897-A-3485), as well as other topographical views of the same format, inscribed with the location at upper centre.

Ingrid Oud, 2000/Lukas Nonner, 2019

Q. Buvelot, Jacob van Ruisdael schildert Bentheim, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2009, pp. 36-37 (fig. 28; as formerly attributed to Jacob van Ruisdael, Landscape with Castle Bentheim)

I. Oud, 2000/L. Nonner, 2019, 'anonymous, Landscape with a Castle near the Bank of a River, c. 1650 - c. 1675', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200143789