watermark: none

I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations, 3 vols., The Hague 1983, no. III 50; K.G. Boon, Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries, 2 vols., coll. cat. Amsterdam 1978 (Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), II 219

several brown stains and tears along the edges

Possibly from the estate of Jacques de Gheyn III and acquired from his cousin and heir, Nicolaes den Otter (?-?), Amsterdam, by Joannes Wtenbogaert (1608-1680), Amsterdam; by descent to Jan van Gheel (1667 - 1757) and Jacob van Gheel (1670 - 1721), Amsterdam; ? sale Jacob van Gheel, Amsterdam (J. P. Zomer), 22 January 1722; ? collection Jan Pietersz Zomer (1641-1724), Amsterdam; his sale Amsterdam (J. van Zutphen & G. Hol), 5 April 1725;…; ? Dutch private collection; Paul Brandt, Amsterdam;¹¹C. van Hasselt and M. van Berge-Gerbaud, Le Héraut du dix-septième siècle. Dessins et gravures de Jacques de Gheyn II et III de la Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, exh. cat. Paris, Institut Néerlandais / Fondation Custodia, Paris 1985, under no 13; K.G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German drawings of the XVth and XVIth centuries of the Frits Lugt collection, coll. cat. Paris (Fondation Custodia) 1992, under no. 84. Frits Lugt (1884-1970), Paris; by whom gifted to the museum (L. 2228), 1957

Object number: RP-T-1957-258

Credit line: Gift of the Fondation Custodia

De Gheyn knew Pieter Pauw (1564-1617), a professor at the University of Leiden who initiated the construction of the first anatomical theatre in the Netherlands. During the winter months, Pauw performed dissections at the theatre for students and faculty members, as well as members of the public. De Gheyn probably attended several of these sessions and took his son, Jacques de Gheyn III (1596-1641), with him as it was an excellent opportunity for his young apprentice to study and draw the human body. Three drawings of dissected limbps might be connected to these drawing sessions: the present sheet, a second study of the same arm in black ink, also in the Rijksmuseum’s collection (inv. no. RP-T-1948-346 and a sheet with four studies of an amputated left leg in the Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris (inv. no. 6866).²²K.G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German drawings of the XVth and XVIth centuries of the Frits Lugt collection, coll. cat. Paris (Fondation Custodia) 1992, no. 95.

According to Van Regteren Altena, all three studies were made De Gheyn III and he dates the drawings around 1615, when De Gheyn III would have been around eighteen years old. While this is certainly possible, it seems more likely that the present sheet was made by De Gheyn II, who mastered the chalk medium and created delicate chalk drawings that convincingly portray the subtle differences between muscle groups and bone structures. Further, De Gheyn III’s small attributed oeuvre does not contain chalk drawings, in contrast to his father’s oeuvre, which includes several drawings in chalk.³³Van Regteren Altena tentatively attributed one study of a seated young man in black and white chalk to De Gheyn III, but acknowledged the lack of other examples, cf. I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations, 3 vols., The Hague 1983, no. III 36. Seen in this light, it seems more likely that De Gheyn III was responsible for inv. no. RP-T-1948-346, which is executed entirely with pen. Perhaps father and son participated in a joint drawing session and would each have made their own drawings of the same dissected limbs; the father in chalk, the son in pen. It seems plausible that we see the hands of both artists in the Paris sheet, where the father was responsible for the upper two legs in chalk and the son, to further his studies, would have finished his father’s initial chalk sketch of the lower legs with black ink.

The present sheet probably stayed in the possession of De Gheyn III until his death. According to Boon and Van Regteren Altena, the estate was passed along to De Gheyn’s cousin and heir, Nicolaes den Otter (?-?) and put into a numbered album at some point, either in the late-seventeenth, or eighteenth century. The present drawing and the Paris sheet were put next to each other as they were consecutively numbered ‘29’and ‘30’. The album contained at least ninety sheets; Boon was able to able to trace thirty-three of the album sheets, the lowest number being “2”, the highest “90”.⁴⁴K.G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German drawings of the XVth and XVIth centuries of the Frits Lugt collection, coll. cat. Paris (Fondation Custodia) 1992, under no. 84. Several sheets with drawings on the recto and verso have a different number for each drawing, cf. C. van Hasselt and M. van Berge-Gerbaud, Le Héraut du dix-septième siècle. Dessins et gravures de Jacques de Gheyn II et III de la Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt, exh. cat. Paris (Institut Néerlandais) 1985, under no 13. Thirteen sheets are either by De Gheyn II or III and twenty studies of female nudes are attributed to Govert Flinck (1615-1660) and, more recently, some to Ferdinand Bol (1616-1690).⁵⁵Ibid.; see a drawing of a Reclining Female Nude at the Getty Museum, Los Angeles, (inv. no. 2020.4.1).

Both Boon and Van Regeteren Altena suggested that the album may have belonged to Johannes Wtenbogaert (1608-1680), who inherited works by Den Otter and was, according to Houbraken, in close contact with Flinck.⁶⁶I.Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations, 3 vols., The Hague 1983, no. III 50; K.G. Boon, The Netherlandish and German drawings of the XVth and XVIth centuries of the Frits Lugt collection, coll. cat. Paris (Fondation Custodia) 1992, no. 84.

The album was acquired by Paul Brandt around 1939-1940, probably from a collector in Amsterdam. He sold the individual sheets to several collectors: the numbers ‘2’, ‘3’, ‘57’, ‘83’, ‘89’ and ‘90’ are now at the Fondation Custodia (inv. nos. 6859-6863), the numbers ‘88’ and ‘89’ were sold at the Van Regteren Altena sale in 2014⁷⁷Sale, Christie’s (Amsterdam), 10 December 2014, no. 127., and a drawing with the number ‘38’ was sold to the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, in 2020.

Carolyn Mensing, 2020

C. Mensing, 2020, 'attributed to Jacques de (II) Gheyn, Four Studies of an Amputated Human Right Arm, Leiden, c. 1615', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200118555