Standing Youth in a Large Hat, with a Basket under his Arm

watermark: foolscap (fragment)

Brown and brownish-green oil stains; small hole on the right edge below centre

...; sale, Jacob de Vos Jbzn (1803-78, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 22 May 1883 sqq., no. 52 (‘Hiob Berkheyden. Feuilles d’étude. - Trois dessins. A la sanguine et à la pierre noire’), fl. 48, to the Vereniging Rembrandt (L. 2135), for the museum (L. 2228) as J. Berckheyde¹¹Copy RKD.

ObjectNumber: RP-T-1883-A-264

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

Gerrit Berckheyde used his chalk figure studies – many of which were formerly attributed to Cornelis Bega (1631-1664) – as the basis for the staffage in his townscapes. Since Schatborn’s 1981 publication on figure studies, including examples by several Haarlem draughtsmen,⁸⁸P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, pp. 99-112. it has become easier to distinguish the hands of Berckheyde and Bega. Berckheyde’s hatching is less rigid and more rounded, and the contrasts between light and dark passages less intense. His figures tend not to be silhouetted by extensive hatched backgrounds, and he often drew broad hands with fat fingers.

When Berckheyde wanted to include staffage in his paintings, he selected suitable figure studies from his considerable cache of drawings, which he assembled in ever-different combinations in his pictures. The same types can thus be seen in different paintings. To increase his options, he made counterproofs of his chalk figure studies in order to paint them in reverse. Occasionally, he also altered the clothing or attributes of the figures.

No such changes, however, were made by Berckheyde when he incorporated the present study in several paintings datable from circa 1670 and later, the Italianate Landscape with a Vegetable Market, which was on the Amsterdam art market in 1985;⁹⁹Sale, Amsterdam (Christie’s), 21 May 1985, no. 147. the Oriental Market Hall, which was on the Munich art market in 1971;¹⁰¹⁰With Kunsthandel Gebhardt, 1971; Th. le Claire, Women Observed: Twenty Master Drawings, exh. cat. Hamburg (Le Claire Kunst) 1996, under no. 8, fig. 1. and the View of Cologne, with the Church of the Holy Apostles in the Kölnisches Stadtmuseum, Cologne (inv. no. KSM 1903/41).¹¹¹¹J. Bikker, ‘Cologne, the “German Rome”, in Views by Berckheyde and Van der Heyden and the Journals of Seventeenth-century Dutch Tourists’, Simiolus 32 (2006), no. 4, fig. 5. The pose, clothing and attributes of the boy in the paintings are identical to those in the Rijksmuseum drawing. The same study was used – this time in reverse and with minor changes in the boy’s clothes – in a painting in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the View along the Rhine near the Church of St Cunibert, Cologne (inv. no. 1042).¹²¹²C. Lawrence, Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde (1638-1698): Haarlem Cityscape Painter, Doornspijk 1991, fig. 89; J. Bikker, ‘Cologne, the “German Rome”, in Views by Berckheyde and Van der Heyden and the Journals of Seventeenth-century Dutch Tourists’, Simiolus 32 (2006), no. 4, fig. 4. The Rijksmuseum preserves another figure study for the Boijmans painting, the Seated Man Drinking (inv. no. RP-T-1989-106), and a second figure study for the painted Oriental Market Hall also survives, the Young Woman Seated at a Barrel in the Morgan Library & Museum, New York (inv. no. 1996.3), which was also once given to Bega.¹³¹³J. Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, 2 vols., coll. cat. New York 2006, no. 27.

The boy represented here, with his large, soft hat, was one of Berckheyde’s favourite models. The artist drew him several times in different poses, for instance on a sheet in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (KdZ 314),¹⁴¹⁴E. Bock and J. Rosenberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Die niederländischen Meister: Beschreibendes Verzeichnis sämtlicher Zeichnungen, 2 vols., coll. cat. Berlin 1930, I, Rosenberg, p. 81. which the artist employed, among others, for his painted View of Heidelberg now in the Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen (inv. no. KMSsp536).¹⁵¹⁵C. Lawrence, Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde (1638-1698): Haarlem Cityscape Painter, Doornspijk 1991, fig. 94. The same youth was depicted in a drawing classified as Bega in the Groninger Museum, Groningen (inv. no. 1919.0439),¹⁶¹⁶J. Bolten, Nederlandse en Vlaamse tekeningen uit de zeventiende en achttiende eeuw. Keuze van tekeningen in de verzameling van het Groninger Museum voor Stad en Lande, Groningen 1965, no. 18. and possibly in another study by a different hand, executed in black and white chalk on blue paper, that was auctioned as circle of Berckheyde in New York in 1990.¹⁷¹⁷Sale, New York (Christie’s), 10 January 1990, no. 177.

Bonny van Sighem, 2001/Jane Shoaf Turner, 2020

P. Schatborn, Hollandse genre-tekeningen uit de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1973, p. 19, under no. 8; P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, no. 15; M.A. Scott, Cornelis Bega (1631/32-1664) as Painter and Draughtsman, 2 vols., Ann Arbor (MI) 1984 (PhD diss., University of Maryland), pp. 132-33, 430, no. GB3, fig. 189; J.F. Heijbroek (ed.), De verzameling van mr. Carel Vosmaer (1826-1888), exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1989, p. 70, under no. 26; C. Lawrence, Gerrit Adriaensz. Berckheyde (1638-1698): Haarlem Cityscape Painter, Doornspijk 1991, p. 19 (n. 20); W.W. Robinson, Seventeenth-century Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Vienna (Graphische Sammlung Albertina)/New York (Pierpont Morgan Library)/Cambridge (MA) (Fogg Art Museum) 1991-92, p. 206, under no. 94; B.P.J. Broos and M. Schapelhouman, Nederlandse tekenaars geboren tussen 1600 en 1660, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1993 (Oude tekeningen in het bezit van het Amsterdams Historisch Museum, waaronder de collectie Fodor, vol. 4), p. 40, under no. 26, n. 1, 2, 4; C. Lawrence, ‘Gerrit (Adriaensz.) Berckheyde’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., London/New York 1996, III, p. 762; Th. le Claire, Women Observed: Twenty Master Drawings, exh. cat. Hamburg (Le Claire Kunst) 1996, no. 8, fig. 2; J. Shoaf Turner, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, 2 vols., coll. cat. New York 2006, p. 34, under no. 27 (n. 2); G. Luijten et al., Drawings for Paintings in the Age of Rembrandt, exh. cat. Washington (DC) (National Gallery of Art)/Paris (Fondation Custodia) 2016-17, no. 123

B. Van Sighem, 2001/J. Turner, 2020, 'Gerrit Berckheyde, Standing Youth in a Large Hat, with a Basket under his Arm, Haarlem, c. 1670 - 1698', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.27416