Watermark: Illegible

…; from the dealer L. Franklyn, as Rembrandt, London, fl. 3,194.20, to the museum, with support from the F. G. Wallerfonds, 1953

Object number: RP-T-1953-139

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the F.G. Waller-Fonds

This unusual Old Testament subject represents I Samuel 26:1-10. Saul took his army into the desert to defeat David and his men. One night David and his nephew Abishai crept into Saul’s camp and found him asleep in his tent, surrounded by Abner and his people, with his spear stuck in the ground near his head. In the drawing, Abishai has pulled the spear from the ground, intent on killing Saul, who is sprawled at left on his back asleep, with his shield beside him. David, however, stops Abishai, for Saul had been anointed king by the Lord, and his life could not be taken with impunity. The composition’s originality lies in the pose of David, who approaches Saul’s attacker from behind, just in time to snatch the spear from his hands. The artist struggled to depict David’s and Abishai’s tussle over the spear, as is clear from the pentimenti and scraped out erasures for the position of their arms and hands. A similar physical struggle takes place in Drost’s drawing of Joseph Threatened by his Brothers, also in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-T-1930-4).

As a draughtsman, Drost worked in the broad, sketchy style associated with Rembrandt’s drawings of circa 1650. The most distinctive stylistic trait is the profuse and uniform parallel hatching, sometimes so dense that the lines flow into one another. The faces of his figures, on the other hand, are rendered with a minimum of lines, and sharp, pointed noses. Like Rembrandt, Drost sketched with penstrokes of varying thickness to create depth in his compositions. In the present drawing, he accentuated the contours of the figures in the foreground (sleeping Saul and Abishai) with broad penlines, whereas the lower half of David’s body, emerging from the background, is drawn with only a few thin lines. The figures themselves tend to be rather squat, stiff and schematic, and somewhat awkwardly composed, especially when more than two figures are involved in a historical narrative.⁴⁴Multi-figure paintings by him are rare; see Sumowski, Gemälde, I (1983), pp. 311-51; J. Bikker, Willem Drost (1633-1659): A Rembrandt Pupil in Amsterdam and Venice, New Haven/London 2005, p. 31. Unlike Rembrandt – who was a master at representing feet and well-grounded figures – the feet are missing in all the figures in this drawing (except for Saul’s raised left foot).

Bonny van Sighem, 2000

O. Benesch, Rembrandt: Ausstellung im 350. Geburtsjahr des Meister, exh. cat. Vienna (Graphische Sammlung Albertina) 1956, no. 84 (as Rembrandt); H.M. Rotermund, Rembrandts Handzeichnungen zur Bibel, Stuttgart 1963, pp. 98, 313, fig. 104 (as Rembrandt); O. Benesch, ‘Neuentdeckte Zeichnungen von Rembrandt’, Jahrbuch der Berliner Museen n.s. 6 (1964), p. 132 (as Rembrandt); O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt (rev. edn. by E. Benesch), 6 vols., London 1973 (orig. edn. 1954-57), no. 650a (as Rembrandt), with earlier additional literature; W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, 10 vols., New York 1979-92, I (1979), p. 462, under no. 219* (as not by Ferdinand Bol); V (1981), p. 2826, under no. 1276a* (no attribution); P. Schatborn, ‘Tekeningen van Rembrandts leerlingen’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 33 (1985), no. 2, p. 101, fig. 14; W.W. Robinson, ‘Review of P. Schatborn, Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, The Hague 1985’, Kunstchronik 41 (1988), p. 584; H. Bevers, P. Schatborn and B. Welzel, Rembrandt, the Master and his Workshop: Drawings and Etchings, exh. cat. Berlin (Kupferstichkabinett) and elsewhere 1991-92, p. 142, under no. 45, n. 3; D.A. de Witt, L. van Sloten and J. van der Veen, Rembrandt’s Late Pupils: Studying under a Genius, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2015, p. 122, no. 17 (c. 1650-53)

B. van Sighem, 2000, 'attributed to Willem Drost, David Prevents Abishai from Killing Saul, Amsterdam, c. 1650 - c. 1655', in J. Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200125746