Coming from an album with drawings that was part of the museum’s oldest holdings, the present sheet was inventoried in the 1970s as ‘Jan Steen?’. This was possibly because similar figure types occur in paintings by the artist, for instance Skittle Players outside a Tavern (c. 1660-63) in the National Gallery, London (inv. no. NG2560), or Peasants Merrymaking outside a Tavern (c. 1652-56), which was on the art market in 2012. However, there is hardly any stylistic affinity with the only two rare figure studies securely given to Steen, both of which appear on a double-sided sheet in the Rijksmuseum’s collection, with a Study of a Seated Man Smoking a Pipe on the recto and a Study of a Man Playing Skittles on the verso.
The sketch of a male head on the verso of the present sheet – also somewhat comparable to figure types in paintings by Steen, such as The Dissolute Household (c. 1661-63), in the Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London (inv. no. WM.1514-1948) – is done in a slightly subtler manner. However, the handling is not sufficiently high in quality to justify an attribution to Steen or to his presumed teacher, Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685), another artist who often made black chalk figure studies on blue paper. For the moment, the author must remain anonymous.
Annemarie Stefes, 2019
