Tobias Verhaecht (Antwerp 1561 – 1631 Antwerp)

Mountainous Landscape with Shipping on a River or Coast

Pen and brown ink, brown wash, over traces of black chalk, brown ink framing lines, 210 x 332 mm (8.3 x 13.1 inch)

Inscribed ‘P. Bril’ (red chalk, verso)

Provenance
~ Collection George and Maida Abrams, Boston, USA, 1960s
~ Anonymous sale, Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 14 November 2006, lot 4, repr.
~ With Robert Noortman, Maastricht, where acquired by:
~ Private collection, Germany, until 2025

Exhibited
Dutch Drawings from the Abrams Collection, Wellesley (Wellesley College Museum), Massachusetts 1969, cat. no. 42

***

Tobias Verhaecht was born in Antwerp in 1561 as the son of Cornelis Verhaecht, a member of a prominent family of artists.¹ He is believed to have travelled to Italy during the 1580s and upon his return married Suzanna van Mockenborch, a relative of Peter Paul Rubens. She died in 1595 and in 1596 Verahecht re-married Hester Pamphi; their sons Willem van Haecht II and Peter van Haecht both became painters. Verhaecht was a member of the chamber of rhetoricians called ‘Violieren’. He was presumably taught by his father, though his works display the influence of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.

Verhaecht was a ‘wijnmeester’ (son of a master) in the Guild of St Luke, of which he became dean in 1595. He lived in a house called ‘Keizershoofd’ on the corder of the Arenbergstraat and St-Maartenstraat in Antwerp, where he had a successful studio with many pupils, including briefly the young Peter Paul Rubens around 1592. Other pupils include Joos de Momper and Maerten Rijckaert. Verhaecht specialised in wide panoramic landscapes and frequently collaborated with Jan Brueghel and Frans Francken II, who painted figures in his landscapes. He was briefly mentioned by Karel van Mander in his Schilder-Boeck of 1604, ‘die een aerdigh goet Landtschap-maker is’ (‘who is a rather good maker of landscapes’).²

Landscape paintings by Verhaecht are present in some of the leading museums of the world, including the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe and the Hermitage, St Petersburg. A typical panoramic landscape painting by Verhaecht is preserved in the Royal Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels.³ Drawings by the artist are characterised by Verhaecht’s typical vertical hatching, which can also be observed in our large sheet. Comparable drawn landscapes are preserved in the collections of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf, the Städelschen Kunstinstitut, Frankfurt-am-Main, the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, the Fondation Custodia, Paris and the Albertina, Vienna.

The handling of the trees and particularly the delineation of the clouds and the horizontal strokes between the clouds of our drawing is close to the handling of a monogrammed drawing in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, which is dated 1616 (fig.).⁴ The vastness and level of detail in these two panoramic drawings is characteristic for the work of Tobias Verhaecht and his contemporary Netherlandish landscapists. It is the reason why their works are often referred to as ‘world landscapes’. During the mid-sixteenth century, Netherlandish artists had played an important role in the development of landscape in art, which would eventually become an independent genre.

1. For the artist, see J. van Roey, ‘De eerste leermeester van P.P. Rubens: Tobias van Haecht’, De Rederijker. Driemaandelijks kultureel tijdschrift, November-December 1977 (non-paged), H.W. Grohn, ‘Tobias Verhaecht und die “Landschaft mit der Flucht nach Ägypten”’, Jahrbuch der Hamburger Kunstsammlungen 18 (1973), pp. 69-74 and J. van Roey, ‘Het Antwerpse geslacht van Haecht (Verhaecht). Tafereelmakers, schilders, kunsthandelaars’, Miscellanea Jozef Duverger. Bijdragen tot de kunstgeschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. 1 (1968), pp. 216-229.
2. Karel van Mander, Het schilder-boeck (…), Haarlem 1604, ed. H. Miedema, The lives of the illustrious Netherlandish and German painters, Doornspijk 1994-99, fol. 295v.
3. Oil on panel, 49.5 x 76 cm, signed with monogram ‘TVH’ and dated 1614, inv. no. 10832. 
4. Pen and brown ink, brown and blue wash, black chalk, 251 x 348 mm, signed with monogram ‘TVH’ and dated 1616, inv. no. 58.72; Marijn Schapelhouman, Nederlandse tekeningen omstreeks 1600 / Netherlandish drawings circa 1600, Amsterdam/The Hague 1987, vol. 3, p. 144, under cat. 87, note 1.