…; ? sale, A.G. de Visser (The Hague), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 16 May 1881 sqq., no. 489 (‘Corneille de Visscher. Portrait d’une dame. Portrait en buste, vu de ¾ à gauche; la personne est coiffée d’un bonnet blanc, d’òu sortent des cheveux qui tombent en boucles sur une large fraise rabattue. Superbe dessin à la pierre noire, sur peau de vélin. - H. 28, L. 20 cent.’), fl. 140, to the dealer R.W.P. de Vries, Amsterdam;¹¹Copy RKD. …; from the dealer F. Muller, Amsterdam, fl. 185, to the museum (L. 2228), 1882

Object number: RP-T-1882-A-165

The present drawing is a copy after Visscher’s signed Portrait of a Seated Woman in the British Museum, London (inv. no. 1847,0326.18).²²Oral communication John Hawley, 30 August 2016; A.M. Hind, Catalogue of Drawings by Dutch and Flemish Artists Preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, 5 vols., coll. cat. London 1915-32, IV (1931), no. 6. Although the artist occasionally made autograph versions, the quality of the Rijksmuseum’s sheet is not of the same level as Visscher’s original drawings. The woman’s clothes, for example, are sloppily drawn and the shadows on her left sleeve and in the folds of her dress do not convey a sense of three-dimensional form. Upon closer examination, her face, which is drawn with hesitant and broken lines, is also of inferior execution.

Little is known about Visscher’s workshop. Based on stylistic similarities, it has been suggested that Abraham Blooteling (1634-after 1698) and Cornelis van Dalen II (1638-1664) were his pupils.³³J. Hawley, The Drawings of Cornelis Visscher (1628/9-1658), Charlottesville (VA) 2015 (unpubl. PhD diss. University of Virginia), unpag. The author kindly granted me access to the first chapter of his unpublished PhD research, ‘The Life of the Artist’. Visscher’s younger brother, Jan Visscher (1633/34-1712), probably also studied under him.⁴⁴Ibid; J. Hawley, ‘An Introduction to the Life and Drawings of Jan de Visscher’, Master Drawings 52 (2014), no. 1, p. 63. The museum’s drawing could be a studio work, which was made by a pupil after the original as a training exercise. However, there is not enough evidence to attribute it to one of the artists mentioned above.

Bonny van Sighem, 2000/Marleen Ram, 2019

Getekende Nederlandsche portretten, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet) 1905, no. 53 or 54

B. Sighem, 2000/M. Ram, 2019, 'anonymous, Portrait of a Young Woman, c. 1650 - c. 1700', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200145413