Watermark: Foolscap

…; ? collection Kornelis van Alkemade (1654-1737), Rotterdam;¹¹According to an inscription on the drawing. his son-in-law, Pieter van der Schelling (1691-1751), Rotterdam;²²According to an inscription on the drawing. his heirs, Johanna van den Hoek-van der Schelling (1692-?), Hendrik van der Schelling (1694-1772) and Geertruida Stiermans-van der Schelling (?-1774), Rotterdam;³³Mees 1941, pp. 156-58.…; collection Frederik Carel Theodoor, Baron van Isendoorn à Blois, Heer van Feluy en Cannenburgh (1784-1865), Kasteel De Cannenburgh, Vaassen, Gelderland (L. 1407); his sale, Amsterdam (C.F. Roos), 19 Augustus 1879, no. 134, as Rembrandt, fl. 51, to the dealer A.G. de Visser, The Hague;⁴⁴Copy RKD. his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 16 (17) May 1881 sqq., no. 339, as Rembrandt, fl. 82, to the dealer J. de Vries for the museum (L. 2228);⁵⁵For security reasons, the drawing was transferred from the Ministerie van Binnenlandse Zaken to the museum, 22 October 1888; copy RKD; note RMA.

Object number: RP-T-1888-A-1768

Kasteel Honingen in Kralingen, near Rotterdam, was built in the Middle Ages. After being heavily damaged in 1574, the castle was pulled down with the arrival of the French in 1672. It was a favourite subject for numerous artists; see, for example, a drawing by Jan van de Velde (1593-1641) in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (inv. no. JvdV 1 (PK)), and another one by Roelant Roghman (1627-1691) in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-T-1888-A-1436). The present drawing depicts two of the towers, the water surrounding the ruin and on the right the flat landscape and houses in the distance. It was sketched on paper toned with light brown wash and extensively washed with the brush. Parts of the ruin have been accented in red chalk, and the illuminated areas have been heightened with opaque white. The pen lines have been carefully drawn, describing the forms of the building in some detail. The horizontal hatching has been somewhat weakened by the addition of wash. The distant background and the clump of grass in front of the tower have been rendered in a sketchy and open fashion.

At the top right, the drawing is inscribed, Honingen, by either the Rotterdam collector of medals, autographs, original documents and especially (topographical) manuscripts, Kornelis van Alkemade (1654-1737) or his son-in-law, Pieter van der Schelling (1691-1751). The same inscription appears on two other drawings of Honingen in a similar style and technique, one in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (inv. no. WA1855.19, formerly P I, 194),⁷⁷K.T. Parker, Netherlandish, German, French and Spanish Schools, coll. cat. Oxford 1938 (Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, vol. 1), no. 194. and one in the Gemeentearchief, Rotterdam (inv. no. 4080_XXIX-29).⁸⁸Three other drawings of views of Honingen, which have been connected to our sketch, are clearly by another hand: two in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich (inv. nos. 1429 and 1430; W. Wegner, Die niederländischen Handzeichnungen des 15.-18. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols., coll. cat. Munich 1973 (Kataloge der Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung München, vol. 1), nos. 1201-02); and the third in sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller), 11 April 1940, no. 141. For the sheets in Oxford and Amsterdam, the names of Abraham Furnerius (1628-1654)⁹⁹K.T. Parker, Netherlandish, German, French and Spanish Schools, coll. cat. Oxford 1938 (Catalogue of the Collection of Drawings in the Ashmolean Museum, vol. 1). and Pieter de With (c. 1635-after 1689)¹⁰¹⁰M.D. Henkel, Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1942 (Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, vol. 1). have been suggested, but their drawings are not sufficiently similar. An attribution to Jan Ruyscher, who was probably a pupil of Rembrandt (1606-1669) in the mid-1640s, is more likely. The same materials and techniques used for the three views of Kasteel Honingen were also employed for Ruyscher’s Landscape with the City of Naarden in the Distance in the Rijksmuseum (inv. no. RP-T-1891-A-2425). In that drawing, the clouds were indicated with opaque white, and red chalk was used as well. The way in which the clumps of grass were drawn and the houses were shaded suggests that both drawings were made by the same artist. The views of Honingen in Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Oxford would be quite unusual for Ruyscher since most of his drawings are of spacious, panoramic landscapes, but the similarities in style and technique make the attribution plausible. By 1649 Ruyscher was living in Dordrecht, from whence he could have easily visited the castle (now part of metropolitan Rotterdam), before he was appointed as a landscape artist at the court of Cleves in 1652.

Peter Schatborn, 1985/Marleen Ram, 2019

M.D. Henkel, Teekeningen van Rembrandt en zijn school, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1942 (Catalogus van de Nederlandsche teekeningen in het Rijksmuseum te Amsterdam, vol. 1), no. 123 (as Pieter de With?); P. Schatborn, Tekeningen van Rembrandt, zijn onbekende leerlingen en navolgers/Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1985 (Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijksprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, vol. 4), no. 114 (as anonymous, with a tentative attribution to Ruyscher), with earlier literature; W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, 10 vols., New York 1979-92, X (1992), p. 5424, under no. 2394 (as school of Rembrandt, c. 1650); M.C. Plomp, The Dutch Drawings in the Teyler Museum, II: Artists Born between 1575 and 1630, coll. cat. Haarlem 1997, p. 162, under no. 159 (as attributed to Jan Ruyscher by Schatborn)

P. Schatborn, 1985/M. Ram, 2019, 'attributed to Jan Ruyscher, View of Kasteel Honingen near Rotterdam, Rotterdam, c. 1648 - c. 1652', in J. Shoaf Turner (ed.), Drawings by Rembrandt and his School in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200118067