watermark : crescent; generally related to Heawood, no. 848 (Venice: 1548); crown, generally related to Heawood, no. 1122 (Bologna: 1631), but simpler and without a star

...; ? sale, Aegidius Laurens Tolling (c. 1725-1768, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (H. de Winter et al.), 21 November 1768 sqq., Album I, no. 597 (‘Twee stuks Ordinantien van eenige Krygslieden en anderen, zeer uitvoerig met rood en zwart Kryd getekend, door J. De Braey’); ...; ? collection Johan Pieter van den Brande (1707-1758), Middelburg, or his son;¹¹According to dossier J.W. Niemeijer, RMA. by descent to Elbert Carsilius, Baron van Pallandt (1898-1964), Haarlem; his widow, Jonkvrouwe Matthia Abrahamina Cornelia van Pallandt-Sandberg (1899-1982), Arnhem and Haarlem; sale, Elbert Carsilius, Baron van Pallandt, Amsterdam (Sotheby Mak van Waay), 26 September 1972, no. 286, fl. 8.816, to the museum with the support of the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum

Object number: RP-T-1972-81

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum

Dated on 11 December 1650, the present sheet is one of the earliest drawings by Jan de Bray. It copies his father’s painting of the same year, probably before it was installed in the Oranjezaal) in the Huis ten Bosch, The Hague.²²J.W. von Moltke, ‘Jan de Bray’, Marburger Jahrbuch für Kunstwissenschaft 11/12 (1938-39), pp. 421-523, no. 63; cf. J. Giltaij and F. Lammertse, ‘Maintaining a Studio Archive: Drawn Copies by the De Braij Family’, Master Drawings 39 (2001), no. 4, p. 371. To transfer the composition of the large painting, De Bray apparently worked with a grid or at least subsidiary lines, some of which are still faintly visible. Then 23 or 24 years old and working in his father’s studio, Jan may also have helped with the painting.³³J. Giltaij, Jan de Bray (1626/1627-1697). Schilder en architect, Zwolle 2017, p. 234.

The practice of creating a pictorial archive by drawn ricordi was a peculiarity of the De Bray’s studio.⁴⁴On this subject, cf. J. Giltaij and F. Lammertse, ‘Maintaining a Studio Archive: Drawn Copies by the De Braij Family’, Master Drawings 39 (2001), no. 4, pp. 367-94. First, it was Salomon who made his own autograph copies, later his son Jan, and still later, Joseph joined in, as is shown in inv. no. RP-T-1972-82. Like the present sheet, Joseph’s drawing was drawn on old Italian paper, of which there must have been a stock in the family’s studio.

In his drawing, Jan translated the painted colours successfully into the bichrome values of black and red chalk. Highlights were created by leaving the white of the paper partially blank. Only in some cases did he use opaque white: for the strap of the boy’s garb or the saliva running from the open mouth of the large black dog. Jan accurately followed every detail of his father’s model, down to the pupils and highlights in the eyes.⁵⁵The only deviations are found in the background sky, which is left untreated, and the pendentive above the pilasters. Such an accurate contemporary record is regarded a trustworthy document by present-day researchers. According to the drawing, with its shaded passages appearing subtler than in the painting, the respective parts in the painting are believed to having originally shown more degrees of tonal value, apparently having darkened over the centuries.⁶⁶Cf. http://oranjezaal.rkdmonographs.nl/cat.-nr.-13, under 2.2.4 and 4.

A fact overlooked so far is the use of pinpricking in the drawing. The corners of the single coffers of the ceiling were marked with a needle, as are the centres of the rosettes. This structure is pricked even in places where the architecture is covered by other motifs, such as shield, quiver and helmet on top of the pile of trophies. There is also a diagonal line of pricking rather randomly applied, running from the helmet with the lion’s head to the harness to the quiver. How is this procedure to be explained? Instead of being applied all over the drawing, the pricked ares mark only ‘strategic spots’ in a defined part of the composition, namely the barrel-vaulted ceiling. A similar ceiling, in reverse, is found in Salomon’s companion painting of 1649, the Allegorical Triumph with Musicians and Captured Flags. Presumably Jan would have made a ricordo of that piece as well.⁷⁷Such a drawing might even be the companion of the present sheet in the catalogue of the Tolling sale. To achieve a mirror image of the identical architectural setting, pinpricking would have been an enormous time-saver. Jan would have placed the present sheet (with its present verso facing up) under the presumed first ricordo. He would have fixed it with pins in the lower half, the traces of which are still visible (left, at the forearm of the soldier standing in the shadow, and right, at the right edge of the old soldier’s round shield). Then he would have marked the structure of the ceiling with carefully placed pinpricks, a method that would spare him the intense task of creating two identical versions of the elaborate setting. After pricking, Jan would have needed only to turn the present sheet over (with its recto now facing up) to create a mirror image of the barrel vault corresponding to Salomon’s second painting. Only one question remains: what was the function of the pinpricked diagonal that does not relate to the present drawing’s composition? Could it be an echo of some diagonal found in the second triumph (e.g. contours of a flag), which Jan might have inadvertently copied?

Annemarie Stefes, 2019

‘Keuze uit aanwinsten’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 21 (1973), no.?, pp. 32, 43 (fig. 19); P. Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksprentenkabinet)/Washington (National Gallery of Art) 1981-82, pp. 104, 132; J. Giltaij and F. Lammertse, ‘Maintaining a Studio Archive: Drawn Copies by the De Braij Family’, Master Drawings 39 (2001), no. 4, pp. 371, 374 (fig. 7), 392 (n. 17); B. Coenen, ‘The Drawings of the Haarlem Amateur Leendert van der Cooghen’, Master Drawings 43 (2005), no.1, pp. 19, 89 (n. 41; fig. 11); J. Giltaij, Jan de Bray (1626/1627-1697). Schilder en architect, Zwolle 2017, pp. 41, 234-35, no. T7; http://oranjezaal.rkdmonographs.nl/cat.-nr.-13, no. 3.1.2.1 (fig. 6; consulted 17 January 2018); A. Stefes, ‘Traces Traced: Methods of Transfer Found in Drawings by Karel Dujardin, Willem Romeyn and Jan de Bray’, Delineavit et Sculpsit 45 (2019), pp. 20-21

A. STefes, 2019, 'Jan de Bray, Allegorical Triumph with Spoils of Weapons, Haarlem, 1650-12-11', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200120131