Lot 64: CORNELIS VAN POELENBURCH

CORNELIS VAN POELENBURCH UTRECHT 1594/95 - 1667 RECTO : LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES AND FARMHOUSES; VERSO : A FIGURE HOLDING A VASE, AFTER THE ANTIQUE Pen and brown ink and wash over black chalk, within drawn border in pen and brown ink ( recto ); red chalk counterproof ( verso ); signed with initials, lower left: CP 187 by 237 mm

Mathias Polakovits (L.3561);
sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 11 November 1997, lot 84;
with Thomas Le Claire Kunsthandel, Hamburg (Master Drawings 1500-1900, 1998, no. 11, catalogue entry by Alan Chong), from whom bought by the present owner

In his entry written for the 1998 Thomas Le Claire catalogue, Alan Chong dates this drawing towards the end of Poelenburch's stay in Italy, where he lived and worked from approximately 1617 until 1624. Together with Bartholomäus Breenbergh, a fellow pupil of Abraham Bloemaert, Poelenburch was one of the earliest and most influential of the Dutch Italianate artists, travelling extensively in the Roman campagna, where he made numerous extremely atmospheric drawings and paintings.

With its broad, strong wash and dynamic composition structure, this drawing appears later in date than certain Italian period drawings by Poelenburch that are dated between 1619 and 1622υ1, and more akin to the grand drawing of 1623, now in the Getty Museum.υ2 The motif of the central building, with its interesting profile and roofline, must have appealed to the artist; much the same building appears, transported from its actual roadside location to the top of a rocky outcrop, in Poelenburch's important early 1620s painting of a Roman landscape capriccio, now in the Royal Collection.υ3

A copy of the present drawing is in the Städel Museum, Frankfurt (Inv. no. 3145)

1. See A. Chong, 'The Drawings of Cornelis van Poelenburch', in Master Drawings, vol. 25, 1987, pp. 24-5, nos. 1-9
2. Ibid, no. 16
3. See C. White, The Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge 1982, no. 141, illus.