Rembrandt School, circa 1650

Study for the Portrait of a Gentleman

Black and white chalk on buff paper, 303 x 203 mm (11.9 x 8 inch)

Provenance
Private collection, The Netherlands

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This newly discovered powerful study sheet was drawn in the years around 1650, presumably in Amsterdam, where various former pupils of Rembrandt developed a fashion for more elegant and colourful portraits, inspired by the portraits of Sir Anthony van Dyck, turning away from the more sombre style their former master. Drawn studies for these oil portraits are very rare, but a small number exists, generally attributed to either Govert Flinck (Cleves 1615 – 1660 Amsterdam) or Jacob Backer (Harlingen 1608 – 1651 Amsterdam), though the close artistic similarity of both artists often complicates a precise attribution.

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn (1606–1669) was the most influential artistic personality of the Dutch Golden Age. As is well known, Rembrandt’s studio attracted a host of students, pupils and collaborators, who paid annual tuition fees to the master. Drawing was enormously important to Rembrandt, whose creative thought processes can often be followed by studying his surviving drawings. Rembrandt impressed the importance of drawing upon his students, who strived to emulate the master’s drawing style as closely as possible. Both Flinck and Backer initially worked in a Rembrandtesque manner, and developed a more international style around 1645-1650.

Although the present sheet is more powerful than most currently known portrait studies by Flinck, for instance the study of a Standing Man in the Rijksmuseum (fig.),¹ the characteristic delineation of the facial features is close to Flinck’s study of a Youth Kneeling in the Moravská Galeri in Brno (fig.).² Compositionally, our drawing is reminiscent of portraits in oils by Flinck such as his portrait of a young man of 1645 in the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn (fig.).³

1. White and black chalk on blue paper, 392 x 240 mm, circa 1644-46, inv. no. RP-T-1975-84; Werner Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, New York 1980, vol. IV, pp. 1908-09, no. 873, repr. 
2. Black chalk, 159 x 161 mm, inv. no. B 2189; Sumowski, op. cit., vol. IV, pp. 1950-51, no. 894, repr.
3. Oil on canvas, 102 x 85 cm, signed and dated ‘G. Flinck f. 1645’; Rheinisches Landesmuseum, Bonn, inv. no. 67.258; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt Schüler, Landau/Pfalz 1983, vol. II, no. 700, repr. p. 1132 (colour).