Watermark: None visible through lining

Laid down

…; collection Richard Houlditch II (?-1760), London (L. 2214); ? his sale, London (Langford), 12 (13) February 1760 sqq., possibly no. 53, as Rembrandt van Rijn (‘Four by Rembrandt’), with three other drawings, £ 2.5.0, to John Spencer, 1st Duke of Marlborough (1734-83), Blenheim;¹¹Copy BML.…; sale, Marquess of Cholmondeley et al. [Section ‘The property of a Nobleman’], London (Sotheby’s), 19 February 1930, no. 73, £ 80, to the dealer Colnaghi, London;²²According to the sale catalogue, the Lord Spencer collection was among the properties being sold; copy RKD.…; collection Isaäc de Bruijn (1872-1953) and his wife, Johanna Geertruida de Bruijn-van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Spiez and Muri, near Bern, by 1937;³³According to Bern 1937, p. 43, no. 184. by whom donated to the museum (L. 2228), 1949, but kept in usufruct; transferred to the museum, 1960

Object number: RP-T-1961-78

Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland

An old man with a beard is looking out from under a fur-trimmed cap. His hands are resting on a stick. The half-length figure was sketched with a finely sharpened pen, then carefully washed with a brush. Several details are very precisely rendered, such as the fur trim, the eyes, the ear and the nose; the beard and the body are more sketchily rendered.

The draughtsmanship is based on Rembrandt’s style of the second half of the 1630s. A good comparison is the Sheet with Studies of Heads and a Woman with a Child, in the Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham (inv. no. 49.10).⁴⁴Benesch, no. 340. The difference between the telling precision and the sketchy, suggestive quality with which these heads on the Barber sheet are rendered and the cautious, descriptive accuracy and the only partially successful sketchiness of the Old Man is immediately noticeable. The whites of the eyes have been indicated in the shadow area under the fur cap. The artist may have borrowed this effect from Rembrandt’s etchings, since it hardly ever occurs in his drawings. The sketch has certainly been cut from a larger sheet, as is the case in comparable drawings by Rembrandt, but it is curious that the staff on which the figure is leaning stops short of the edge of the paper (which might suggest a copy).⁵⁵M. Royalton-Kisch, The Drawings of Rembrandt: A Revision of Otto Benesch’s Catalogue Raisonné (online), no. 349. It was probably drawn in the second half of the 1630s or somewhat later by a student or follower.⁶⁶Royalton-Kisch (ibid.) has proposed that this student may have been Ferdinand Bol, who joined Rembrandt’s studio c. 1636.

Peter Schatborn, 2018

O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 349 (as Rembrandt, c. 1637); P. Schatborn, Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, IV: Tekeningen van Rembrandt, zijn onbekende leerlingen en navolgers/Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1985, no. 100, with earlier literature; M. Royalton-Kisch, The Drawings of Rembrandt: A Revision of Otto Benesch’s Catalogue Raisonné (online), no. 349 (as possibly by Ferdinand Bol, c. 1636-38)

P. Schatborn, 2018, 'school of Rembrandt van Rijn, Old Man in a Fur Cap, Amsterdam, c. 1635 - c. 1640', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200118052