Rembrandt van Rijn, after anonymous

Indian Archer

Amsterdam, c. 1656 - c. 1658

Inscriptions

  • inscribed: lower left, in an old hand, in brown ink, rimbrandt

  • stamped: lower right, with the mark of Warwick (L. 2600)

  • inscribed on verso: centre, in black ink, h. 189 / b. 132 / T 9717; below that, in pencil, R 4

  • stamped on verso: lower left (effaced), with an unidentified mark; centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Technical notes

Watermark: None visible through lining

Condition

Laid down

Provenance

...; collection George Guy Greville, 4th Earl of Warwick (1818-93), Warwick (L. 2600); his sale, London (Christie’s), 20 (21) May 1896 sqq., no. 313 (‘Sketch of an Indian Figure - pen and bistre. 5 in. by 7½ in. [127 mm x 190.5 mm]’), £9.0.0, to the dealer P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., London;1Copy RKD. ...; from the dealer F. Muller & Co., Amsterdam, with two other drawings by Rembrandt, fl. 480, to the museum (L. 2228), 1897

ObjectNumber: RP-T-1897-A-3203

The artist

Biography

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (Leiden 1606 - Amsterdam 1669)

After attending Latin school in his native Leiden, Rembrandt, the son of a miller, enrolled at Leiden University in 1620, but soon abandoned his studies to become an artist. He first trained (1621-23) under the Leiden painter Jacob Isaacsz van Swanenburg (c. 1571-1638), followed by six months with the Amsterdam history painter Pieter Lastman (c. 1583-1633). Returning to Leiden around 1624, he shared a studio with Jan Lievens, where he aimed to establish himself as a history painter, winning the admiration of the poet and courtier Constantijn Huygens. In 1628 Gerard Dou (1613-75) became his first pupil. In the autumn of 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam, where his career rapidly took off. Three years later he joined the Guild of St Luke and married Saskia Uylenburgh (1612-42), niece of the art dealer Hendrik Uylenburgh (c. 1587-1661), in whose house he had been living and working. She died shortly after giving birth to their son Titus, by which time Rembrandt was already in financial straits owing to excessive spending on paintings, prints, antiquities and studio props for his history pieces. After Saskia’s death, Rembrandt lived first with Titus's wet nurse, Geertje Dircx (who eventually sued Rembrandt for breach of promise and was later imprisoned for her increasingly unstable behaviour), and then with his later housekeeper, Hendrickje Stoffels (by whom he had a daughter, Cornelia). Mounting debts made him unable to meet the payments of his house on the Jodenbreestraat and forced him to declare bankruptcy in 1656 and to sell his house and art collection. In the last decade of his life, he, Hendrickje and Titus resided in more modest accommodation on the Rozengracht, but Rembrandt continued to be dogged by continuing financial difficulties. His beloved Titus died in 1668. Rembrandt survived him by only a year and was buried in the Westerkerk.

Entry

Most of the twenty-three known drawings by Rembrandt after Mughal paintings are portraits of Mughal rulers and courtiers at the seventeenth-century courts of Emperor Jahangir (1569-1627) and his son and successor, Shah Jahan (1592-1666), who built the Taj Mahal. Besides the twenty-one examples assembled by Otto and Eva Benesch in the 1973 edition of the Rembrandt drawings corpus,2Benesch, nos. 1187-1206 and 1194A. two others have since been identified: the Medallion Portrait of Muhammad Adil Shah of Bijpur, formerly in the collection of Mrs Christian Aall in New York, later in that of Dr William K. Ehrenfeld (a noted collector of Indian paintings), and now in the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (inv. no. 2000.70),3W.W. Robinson, ‘Review of P. Schatborn, Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, The Hague 1985’, Kunstchronik 41 (1988), p. 585 from pp. 579-86, fig. 4a; J.A. Ganz, Rembrandt’s Century, exh. cat. San Francisco (De Young Museum) 2013, p. 45, fig. 41. and another, representing two female heads, which was seen in a French private collection by Frits Lugt in 1966 and by Martin Royalton-Kisch in 2002. There were once at least two more, for in 1747 a ‘book of lndian drawings by Rembrandt, 25 in number’, was briefly offered for auction in 1747 from the collection of the British portraitist and connoisseur Jonathan Richardson the elder.4According to a copy of the sale catalogue in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the lot was ‘withdrawn’ before the auction. The J. Paul Getty Museum has brought together the majority of the Mughal copies, with the exception of the drawing in the French private collection (which remains unpublished), in the recent exhibition Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India (13 March-24 June 2018). This show, which included all four examples in the Rijksmuseum, was the first time that the works from Richardson’s collection have been reunited since the mid-eighteenth century.

Rembrandt himself owned what are presumed to have been the original models from which his series of drawings was made. The Mughal paintings were described as ‘curious miniature drawings’ in the inventory of his household goods made on 25-26 July 1656 following his bankruptcy: ‘An album filled with curious miniature drawings, together with woodcut and copper engravings of various sorts of costumes’.5RD 1656/12, no. 203: ‘Een ditto (kunst boeck) vol curieuse minijateur teeckeninge nevens verscheijde hout en kopere printen van alderhande dragt.’ Although referred to as ‘drawings’, they are mostly coloured and are what scholars now term ‘paintings’. The album’s prints of figures in different costumes might well have included the series of twelve figures in Italian dress by an anonymous engraver after drawings by Rembrandt’s teacher, Pieter Lastman.6Hollstein, X, nos. 11-22; these prints were issued by I. Covens and C. Mortier and used to decorate the borders of a map of Italy published c. 1650 by Dankert Dankerts, which was based on a map of 1608 by Giovanni Antonio Magini; A. Tümpel and P. Schatborn et al., Pieter Lastman: Leermeester van Rembrandt/The Man who Taught Rembrandt, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 1991-92, no. 39. The Mughal paintings in Rembrandt’s collection had probably arrived in the Dutch Republic via Dutch artists who worked for the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie (VOC or Dutch East India Company), which had an office in Agra, and later for Shah Jahan.7 M.J. Bok, ‘The Migration of Netherlandish Artists to Asia in the Seventeenth Century’, in T. DaCosta Kaufmann and M. North (eds,) Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, Amsterdam 2014, pp. 177-204; K.H. Corrigan, J. van Capen and F. Diercks (eds.), Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Salem (MA) (Peabody Essex Museum) 2015-16, p. 287. It is not known what happened to Rembrandt’s ‘curious miniature drawings’ after the sale of the works on paper from his collection on 20 December 1658.8RD, nos. 1658/19 and 1658/30. The group was probably split up and dispersed to various collections.

Some of Rembrandt’s drawings closely resemble the Mughal paintings that form part of the wall decoration of Schloss Schönbrunn, near Vienna.9J. Strzychowski and H. Gluck, Asiatische Miniaturenmalerei, Klagenfurt 1933, pp. 18-21. Shortly before 1762, Empress Maria Theresa had the room now called the Millionenzimmer decorated with 266 Mughal paintings mounted in rocaille-shaped cartouches within carved wooden frames. We cannot, however, be certain that these versions are any of the ones that Rembrandt actually owned, for such Mughal art works were often copied and repeated by local artists with very little variation (sometimes even generations later), and many of Rembrandt’s drawings do not correspond precisely with those now in Schönbrunn. Moreover, the Schönbrunn paintings are now considered to be mostly provincial work of the late seventeenth or early eighteenth centuries, that is, too late for Rembrandt to have possessed them.10P. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘De Mogol-Miniaturen van Rembrandt’, in H. van den Muyzenberg and T. de Bruijn (eds.), Waarom Sanskrit? Honderdvijfentwintig Jaar Sanskrit in Nederland, Leiden 1991, pp. 99-103 from pp. 95-115; E. Koch, ‘The “Moghuleries” of the Milionenzimmer, Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna’, in R. Crill, S. Stronge and A. Topsfield (eds.), Arts of Mughal India: Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton, Ahmedabad, India/London 2004, pp. 153-55 from pp. 152-67; W.W. Robinson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums, New Haven/London 2016, p. 362, n. 9. However, they do have inscriptions in Dutch on their versos.

The relationship between Rembrandt’s drawings and his Mughal prototypes is interesting. Since there is a clear difference in style, they can scarcely be termed ‘copies’ in the strict sense of the word. Rembrandt basically remained true to his own style and was not interested in copying the paintings as accurately as possible. Inspired by his models, he created a new and unique type of drawing, recording the figures as if they had been sketched from life rather than from a two-dimensional source. Yet the technique of the originals did influence Rembrandt’s style. This can be seen in the fine handling of line and in the careful, but fluent layers of subtly coloured washes. It is, of course, unfair to characterize the Mughal models as stiff in comparison to Rembrandt’s drawings, as some authors have done: they reflect the established modes of expression for Mughal artists at the time. But Rembrandt’s experience of drawing from life led him to make the poses of the Indian figures more natural as he was copying them.11B.P.J. Broos, ‘Rembrandts Indische miniaturen’, Spiegel Historiael 15 (1980), p. 212 from pp. 210-18. He lent their faces the same expressive quality that he would have given a living model.

Rembrandt’s copies are usually dated to about 1656, the year of the bankruptcy inventory and the year of a dated etching, Abraham Entertaining the Angels (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1954-135),12B. 29; New Hollstein: Rembrandt, no. 295. whose composition and individual figures seem to depend on one of the drawn copies showing four Mughal elders, now in the British Museum in London (inv. no. 1895,0915.1275).13Benesch, no. 1187; M. Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the British Museum, coll. cat. (online 2010), no. 56. However, since Rembrandt’s collection of works on paper was not sold until 1658, he could have carried on making copies of the Mughal originals for at least another couple of years. The style of the drawings resembles other drawings from the 1650s and, to some extent, from the 1660s. These copies, in turn, may have influenced Rembrandt’s own drawings to some degree.14There are two drawings that in their brief, sketchy treatment of line somewhat resemble the copies after Mughal paintings: the Dismissal of Hagar, in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1910,0212.175; Benesch, no. 962; M. Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the British Museum, coll. cat. (online 2010), no. 50), and Christ and the Apostles with the Woman who Had an Issue of Blood, in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. no. 8793; Benesch, no. 1052). One characteristic of the copies is that no backgrounds have been indicated, although they appear in many of the known Mughal models. Only the figures were important to Rembrandt as can be seen after all in many of his drawings in which only figures and their interrelationships are depicted.

The Rijksprentenkabinet owns four drawings with Mughal subjects, three of which bear the mark of Jonathan Richardson the elder and must surely have been part of the album from his collection offered from sale in 1747 (inv. nos. RP-T-1961-82, RP-T-1930-41 and RP-T-1961-83). The fourth, the present sheet, lacks not only his collector’s mark but also the typical Richardson mount with a gold border. The same is true of an example in the Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum in Cambridge (MA) (inv. no. 1932.366).15Benesch, no. 1198; W.W. Robinson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums, New Haven/London 2016, no. 72. The absence of the Richardson mark on both sheets, and the previous misidentification of their support as European rather than Japanese paper, led some scholars to doubt the attribution to Rembrandt.16Moreover, Martin Royalton-Kisch has questioned the attribution to Rembrandt of the whole group, proposing as an alternative Aert de Gelder or another pupil; M. Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the British Museum, coll. cat. (online 2010), under no. 56; E. Hinterding and A. Kofuku, Rembrandt: The Quest for Chiaroscuro, exh. cat. Tokyo (National Museum of Western Art)/Nagoya (Nagoya City Art Museum) 2011, p. 120. However, it merely suggests either that the pair never belonged to Richardson, or that they were once the left half of sheets that were later cut in two, with the mark – always applied on the right side or centre of the sheet – remaining only on the other half. Certainly there are examples of drawings that combine two figures, such as Emperor Jahangir Receiving an Officer and Two Mughal Noblemen, in the British Museum (inv. nos. Gg,2.263 and 1895,0915.1281),17Benesch, nos. 1190 and 1204; M. Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the British Museum, coll. cat. (online 2010), nos. 57 and 60. and Two Mughal Noblemen in The Morgan Library & Museum in New York (inv. no. I, 208).18Benesch, no. 1203; J. Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, coll. cat. 2 vols., New York 2006, no. 222. In addition, another sheet in The Morgan, Indian Warrior with a Shield (inv. no. I, 207),19Benesch, no. 1201; J. Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, coll. cat. 2 vols., New York 2006, no. 221. shows clear traces of another figure on the right trimmed edge.

Even so, it must be admitted that the facial details and the hands and feet are less finely sketched in the present work. Whether this was due to the prototype or to the draughtsman is uncertain. These perceived differences in quality led Ben Broos to conclude that the drawing might be by an imitator, but the Japanese paper, the handling of line and especially the wash are, in my opinion, so characteristic of Rembrandt that its authenticity cannot be doubted. There are, however, a few small grey brush lines added by a later hand, which were later partially scratched off.

Peter Schatborn, 2017

Literature

C. Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, Haarlem 1906, no. 1187; W.R. Valentiner, Rembrandt: Die Meisters Handzeichnungen, 2 vols., Stuttgart and elsewhere 1925-34, II (1934), no. 650 (c. 1656); M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. The Hague 1942, no. 30 (1650-55); O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 1202 (c. 1654-56); B.P.J. Broos, Index to the Formal Sources of Rembrandt’s Art, Maarssen 1977, p. 120; B.P.J. Broos, ‘Rembrandts Indische miniaturen’, Spiegel Historiael 15 (1980), p. 218 from pp. 210-18 (as later imitation); 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. The Hague 1985, no. 60, with earlier literature; M. Schapelhouman, Rembrandt and the Art of Drawing, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 19-24, fig. 17; J. Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, coll. cat. 2 vols., New York 2006, p. 149, under no. 221; P. Schatborn, Rembrandt and his Circle: Drawings in the Frits Lugt Collection, 2 vols., coll. cat. Paris 2010, pp. 80, 82-83, under no. 20; S. Schrader and W.W. Robinson, Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India, exh. cat. Los Angeles (J. Paul Getty Museum) (forthcoming 2018)

Citation

P. Schatborn, 2017, 'Rembrandt van Rijn, Indian Archer, Amsterdam, c. 1656 - c. 1658', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.28579

(accessed 2 May 2025 04:32:25).

Footnotes

  • 1Copy RKD.
  • 2Benesch, nos. 1187-1206 and 1194A.
  • 3W.W. Robinson, ‘Review of P. Schatborn, Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, The Hague 1985’, Kunstchronik 41 (1988), p. 585 from pp. 579-86, fig. 4a; J.A. Ganz, Rembrandt’s Century, exh. cat. San Francisco (De Young Museum) 2013, p. 45, fig. 41.
  • 4According to a copy of the sale catalogue in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, the lot was ‘withdrawn’ before the auction. The J. Paul Getty Museum has brought together the majority of the Mughal copies, with the exception of the drawing in the French private collection (which remains unpublished), in the recent exhibition Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India (13 March-24 June 2018). This show, which included all four examples in the Rijksmuseum, was the first time that the works from Richardson’s collection have been reunited since the mid-eighteenth century.
  • 5RD 1656/12, no. 203: ‘Een ditto (kunst boeck) vol curieuse minijateur teeckeninge nevens verscheijde hout en kopere printen van alderhande dragt.’ Although referred to as ‘drawings’, they are mostly coloured and are what scholars now term ‘paintings’.
  • 6Hollstein, X, nos. 11-22; these prints were issued by I. Covens and C. Mortier and used to decorate the borders of a map of Italy published c. 1650 by Dankert Dankerts, which was based on a map of 1608 by Giovanni Antonio Magini; A. Tümpel and P. Schatborn et al., Pieter Lastman: Leermeester van Rembrandt/The Man who Taught Rembrandt, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 1991-92, no. 39.
  • 7M.J. Bok, ‘The Migration of Netherlandish Artists to Asia in the Seventeenth Century’, in T. DaCosta Kaufmann and M. North (eds,) Mediating Netherlandish Art and Material Culture in Asia, Amsterdam 2014, pp. 177-204; K.H. Corrigan, J. van Capen and F. Diercks (eds.), Asia in Amsterdam: The Culture of Luxury in the Golden Age, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Salem (MA) (Peabody Essex Museum) 2015-16, p. 287.
  • 8RD, nos. 1658/19 and 1658/30.
  • 9J. Strzychowski and H. Gluck, Asiatische Miniaturenmalerei, Klagenfurt 1933, pp. 18-21.
  • 10P. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘De Mogol-Miniaturen van Rembrandt’, in H. van den Muyzenberg and T. de Bruijn (eds.), Waarom Sanskrit? Honderdvijfentwintig Jaar Sanskrit in Nederland, Leiden 1991, pp. 99-103 from pp. 95-115; E. Koch, ‘The “Moghuleries” of the Milionenzimmer, Schönbrunn Palace, Vienna’, in R. Crill, S. Stronge and A. Topsfield (eds.), Arts of Mughal India: Studies in Honour of Robert Skelton, Ahmedabad, India/London 2004, pp. 153-55 from pp. 152-67; W.W. Robinson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums, New Haven/London 2016, p. 362, n. 9.
  • 11B.P.J. Broos, ‘Rembrandts Indische miniaturen’, Spiegel Historiael 15 (1980), p. 212 from pp. 210-18.
  • 12B. 29; New Hollstein: Rembrandt, no. 295.
  • 13Benesch, no. 1187; M. Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the British Museum, coll. cat. (online 2010), no. 56.
  • 14There are two drawings that in their brief, sketchy treatment of line somewhat resemble the copies after Mughal paintings: the Dismissal of Hagar, in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1910,0212.175; Benesch, no. 962; M. Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the British Museum, coll. cat. (online 2010), no. 50), and Christ and the Apostles with the Woman who Had an Issue of Blood, in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. no. 8793; Benesch, no. 1052).
  • 15Benesch, no. 1198; W.W. Robinson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums, New Haven/London 2016, no. 72.
  • 16Moreover, Martin Royalton-Kisch has questioned the attribution to Rembrandt of the whole group, proposing as an alternative Aert de Gelder or another pupil; M. Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the British Museum, coll. cat. (online 2010), under no. 56; E. Hinterding and A. Kofuku, Rembrandt: The Quest for Chiaroscuro, exh. cat. Tokyo (National Museum of Western Art)/Nagoya (Nagoya City Art Museum) 2011, p. 120.
  • 17Benesch, nos. 1190 and 1204; M. Royalton-Kisch, Catalogue of Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the British Museum, coll. cat. (online 2010), nos. 57 and 60.
  • 18Benesch, no. 1203; J. Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, coll. cat. 2 vols., New York 2006, no. 222.
  • 19Benesch, no. 1201; J. Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, coll. cat. 2 vols., New York 2006, no. 221.