Watermark: None visible through lining

Light foxing throughout; laid down

…; collection Jean-Francois Gigoux (1806-94), Paris (L. 1164); his sale, Paris (M. Delestre and E. Féral), 20 March 1882 sqq., no. 249, as Ferdinand Bol, with one other drawing, 37 frs. for both, to the dealer Van Gogh, Amsterdam;¹¹Copy RMA. …; collection William Pitcairn Knowles (1820-94), Rotterdam and Wiesbaden (L. 2634); his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 25 June 1895 sqq., no. 208, as Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, with one other drawing, fl. 32 for both, to the dealer H.J. Valk for the Vereniging Rembrandt;²²Copy RKD. from whom, through the mediation of the Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken, fl. 46, to the museum (L. 2228), 1899

Object number: RP-T-1899-A-4307

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

A laughing man looks directly out at the spectator, while the woman who embraces him looks to her right. The man holds a jug in his hand, and he has opened the lid slightly with his thumb. A bag hangs by his side. He raises his right leg, although in an earlier rendering, which was cancelled with hatching, his leg was resting on the ground. An unrecognizable object, possibly a broom, is lying in the foreground.

The pen lines are rather coarse and messy, and the style does not convincingly reflect an original by Rembrandt: the crosshatching on the man’s upper left leg would be especially unusual for him. Moreover, the traces of black chalk under the pen sketch indicate that this is a copy, presumably made by a Rembrandt pupil or follower after one or more untraced originals by him or another school member. In the past, the present drawing has been attributed to Rembrandt’s pupils Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680) and Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (1621-1674) (see Provenance).

Similar types appear in Rembrandt’s etchings, for instance, the laughing boy in the Pancake Woman of 1635 (e.g. inv. no. RP-P-1961-1056).³³B. 124; New Hollstein: Rembrandt, no. 144. Both the subject and the style of the sketch closely resemble a Rembrandt drawing with three sketches of soldiers and women making love, on the verso of a double-sided sheet in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 2312).⁴⁴Benesch, no. 100 verso; H. Bevers, Rembrandt: Die Zeichnungen im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett, kritischer Katalog, coll. cat. Berlin 2006, no. 9. There the man sports a feathered cap, as in the museum’s drawing, but he also wears a sword. This is the way in which the Prodigal Son was usually depicted when accompanied by women of easy virtue. The Amsterdam sketch also has symbolic erotic significance, which can be seen in the open lid of the jug.⁵⁵E. de Jongh, ‘Erotica in vogelperspecticf’, Simiolus 3 (1968-69), pp. 22-74. The Berlin drawing is generally dated to the mid-1630s, as are the etching of the Pancake Woman and the museum’s sketch. Although an attribution of the original prototype to Van den Eeckhout cannot completely be excluded, there are insufficient similarities to his drawings to support this claim. This is also true for Bol.

Peter Schatborn, 2018

M.D. Henkel, Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, I: Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1942, no. 3 (as Gerbrand van den Eeckhout); 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. 94

P. Schatborn, 2018, 'anonymous, Merry Couple, c. 1635', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200118046