Tibout Regters (Dordrecht 1710 – 1768 Amsterdam)

The Poulterer’s Shop

Black chalk, grey wash, heightened with white, on blue paper, black ink framing lines, 199 x 168 mm (7.8 x 6.6 inch)

Inscribed ‘de Moni fe: - ’ (black ink, lower right)

Provenance
~ Probably the artist’s posthumous sale, Hendrik de Winter and Jan Yver, Amsterdam, 18 April 1768, Album 2
~ Christiaan Sepp (c.1720-1775); his sale, Van der Schley, Amsterdam, 5 December 1775, Album F, lot 27: ‘Een Juffrouw by een Vogelverkoper. Met de pen en gewassen door de Moni’ (to ‘Beyen’, together with F26)
~ Professor Johan Quirijn van Regteren Altena, Amsterdam (1899–1980), until sold by his descendants in 2015 (his collector’s mark applied on the verso)

Literature
~ R.J.A. te Rijdt, ‘Tekeningen door Tybout Regters’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum, 54, 2006, p. 16, fig. 12
~ Rudi Ekkart, Tibout Regters 1710-1768: schilder van portretten en conversatiestukken, exh. cat. Enschede (Rijksmuseum Twenthe), p. 116, cat. no. T8

***

Although this charming drawing was sold as a work by the Leiden ‘fijnschilder’ (fine-painter) Louis de Moni (1698–1771) as early as 1775, it was correctly identified as a rare drawing by Tibout Regters by Robert-Jan te Rijdt in 1995.¹ Te Rijdt compared the handling, subject and technique to a drawing of a Lady Receiving a Visitor in the De Grez collection in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels (fig.).² The Brussels drawing includes a highly similar stone niche through which the scene is observed, which was a popular compositional device among Leiden fijnschilders, following in the footsteps of Gerrit Dou. We can only speculate why our drawing gained a Moni provenance at such an early stage: it is possible that a dealer or auctioneer hoped for an increased price, or maybe Regters’s authorship was simply forgotten.

Tibout Regters was born in Dordrecht, but received his artistic education in Amsterdam, by Jan Maurits Quinkhard (1688–1772), after having studied with several minor masters.³ He settled in Amsterdam as an independent master around 1740 and remained there for the rest of his life. He is mostly known as a portrait painter: his early works are small and individual, and shortly before the middle of the century he started painting small family groups, in which a seeming nonchalance in the arrangement and poses of the figures is characteristic. These works by Regters are among the best ‘conversation pieces’ in Dutch art. After 1751 the artist also made some life-size group portraits of Amsterdam burghers. A few genre paintings of market scenes have survived, similar in subject to the present drawing, and Regters is also known to have made mythological pictures, although none of these is currently known.

SOLD

1. The attribution was originally made verbally on 5 September 1995, according to a pencil note on the previous mount, and was then published in an article on Regters’s drawings in 2006, loc. cit.
2. Black chalk, heightened with white, on blue paper, 350 x 273 mm; inv. no. 2607; Te Rijdt, op. cit., fig. 13.
3. For Regters, see: R.E.O. Ekkart, Tibout Regters 1710-1768: schilder van portretten en conversatiestukken, exh. cat. Enschede (Rijksmuseum Twenthe) 2006.