View of the Village of Viersel, near Antwerp

watermark: none

…; acquired by the museum (L. 2228) with support of the Vereniging Rembrandt, 1888¹¹For security reasons, the drawing was transferred from the Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken to the museum in 1888.

ObjectNumber: RP-T-1888-A-1643

The Rijksmuseum holds a collection of 119 landscape drawings by three late seventeenth-century draughtsmen, Josua de Grave (1643-1712), Valentijn Klotz (c. 1646-1721) and his relative (possibly a brother or cousin?), midshipman (‘adelborst’) Barend Klotz (?-?). During the Franco-Dutch war (1672-78), the three artists accompanied the army of the Dutch States-General under the Stadholder Prince Willem III of Orange (1650-1702) on several campaigns to Brabant, Limburg, Hainaut and East Flanders, during which they depicted the encampments, landscapes, cities and villages they encountered along the way. The three artists probably drew in situ and share a very similar style. They often depicted the same sites or even directly copied each other’s works. Only a few of these sheets are fully signed. As a result, the attributions of several of the drawings in this group have shifted back and forth between the three artists’ oeuvres.

Among these groups of drawings are eleven sheets that form a coherent subset. They are roughly the same format, c. 95 x 150 mm, and were likely part of one or more small sketchbooks. Seven of the eleven sheets include a number inscribed in the upper right corner, which corresponds to the chronology of their production. The drawings might have been numbered when they were still part of a sketchbook. The drawings record specific sites and include prominent buildings, often placed in the centre of the sheet. The overall scene is always seen from a distance. To create depth, the foreground is decorated with trees, shrubberies, figures or a body of water in the case of inv. nos. RP-T-00-174 and RP-T-1901-A-4549. In several drawings dated in autumn months, the trees bear leaves (e.g. inv. nos. RP-T-1912-10, RP-T-1900-A-4441, RP-T-1900-A-4442, RP-T-1898-A-3767 and RP-T-1888-A-1641). Perhaps the artist allowed himself some degree of artistic freedom.

The drawings are carried out in pen and brown ink and finished with grey wash applied in varying degrees of density. Inscriptions appear on all of them and include the location and a date, covering the period between May 1674 to November 1675. The dates are written in the same format: first the word ‘den’ (‘the’), then followed by the day, month and year.

At first glance, the drawings appear to have been made by the same draughtsman, for the handling of the pen and the handwriting reveal very few discrepancies. Stylistically, the drawings come closest to the work of Barend Klotz and Josua de Grave, who used a similar technique to render trees and foliage and who worked in a neater manner than Valentijn Klotz.

When comparing the handwriting on this group of drawings with those of autograph drawings by both artists, it perhaps comes closest to that of Barend Klotz, who used the old-fashioned ‘e’ most consistently and whose handwriting is a little less consistent than De Grave’s, whose penmanship is more elegant and often uses curly (capital) letters. Furthermore, when De Grave added a date to his drawings, he followed a consistently different format: first the year and then the day and month (expressed as a fraction) or a split year with the day and month (expressed as a fraction) at the centre. In this group, by contrast, several variations were used. In several drawings by Barend Klotz (e.g. inv. nos. RP-T-1899-A-4281 and RP-T-1913-50), he added the word ‘drawn’ (gete(e)kent) before the date, a feature that can also be found on one drawing in this ‘numbered sketchbook’ group (inv. no. RP-T-1888-A-1612).²²A signed drawing by Barend of the castle in Wouw, Noord-Brabant, in the Special Collections of the University of Leiden (inv. no. P313_2N027) has a similar signature with the additional words, _ geteeckent de 9_ / 22 1671 in the lower right corner, cf. https://geheugen.delpher.nl/nl/geheugen/view?identifier=UBL01%3AP313-2N027.

Assuming the artists worked alongside each other, it is all together possible that their drawings ended up on one large pile and were brought back to their studio. If this were indeed the case, the inscriptions could well have been added at a later point and not necessarily by the artist who made the drawing. This would explain why the inscriptions vary slightly in style and format.

Carolyn Mensing, 2021

From 26 May to 6 June 1675, the Dutch army stayed in Duffel in the province of Antwerp, from where Stadholder Prince Willem III of Orange (1650-1702) undertook little trips to inspect the encampments nearby. The Stadholder stayed at Kasteel Muggenberg in Duffel, where he met with Maurits Lodewijk van Nassau-LaLecq (1631-1683) and with the Spanish commander, Carlos de Aragón de Gurrea, 9th Duke of Villahermosa (1634-1692).⁸⁸J.F. Heijbroek, Met Huygens op reis. Tekeningen en dagboeknotities van Constantijn Huygens jr. (1628-1697), secretaris van stadhouder-koning Willem III, exh. cat Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum), 1982, no. 34. Viersel is about 15 kilometres from Duffel, and the village was one of the locations where the army often resided during the campaigns between 1673 and 1678. The rectory of the church sometimes served as lodging for the Dutch soldiers.⁹⁹B. Daems, Verbeeld land. De provincie Antwerpen in tekeningen, 1600-1900, Antwerp 2006, p. 58, no. 32. Klotz must have hiked out there while staying in Duffel. The church featured prominently at the centre of the drawing is the Sint-Willibrorduskerk, depicted from the south-east.

The year 1659, written on the roof of the church, probably refers to the year of its replacement. The new church bell was installed in 1661. During the religious wars of the second half of the sixteenth century, the fourteenth-century church was completely destroyed, and in 1628 the largely rebuilt church was lost to fire. The church that Klotz recorded was therefore brand new.¹⁰¹⁰Ibid.

Carolyn Mensing, 2019

R.J.G.M. van Hasselt, ‘Drie tekenaars van topografische prenten in Brabant en elders. Valentijn Klotz, Josua de Grave en Constantijn Huygens Jr.’, Jaarboek Oudheidkundige Kring ‘De Ghulden Roos’ 25 (1965), pp. 145-92; B. Daems, Verbeeld land. De provincie Antwerpen in tekeningen, 1600-1900, Antwerp 2006, p. 58, no. 32

C. Mensing, 2019, 'attributed to Barend Klotz, View of the Village of Viersel, near Antwerp, Viersel, 1675-05-31', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.54303