Lot 122: Gerrit Lamberts (Amsterdam 1776-1850)

The interior of a house, with an open door showing the street beyond
inscribed '... Kammer te Utrecht'
black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown and grey wash, traces of black chalk framing lines, watermark Strasburg Lily with JH & Zoon and beehive
7 3/4 x 8 1/8 in. (197 x 206 mm.)

London, Royal Academy, The Paul Oppé Collection, 1958, no. 414 (as attributed to Jacob Vrel).

Purchased from Parsons, 13 August 1910 (5s.).

Lamberts studied drawing under Daniel Kerkhoff, but was never a professional artist. He inherited his father's bookshop at the age of seventeen, and also worked for the Amsterdam Town Council, eventually becoming Chief Clerk. From 1824 he was the first superintendent of the National Museum, the forerunner of the Rijksmuseum. The drawings that have come down to us are almost all interiors or of topographically correct views, the vast majority of his native Amsterdam. A view of The interior of the artist's house in Amsterdam in the Leiden University Print Room shows a character and sense of perspective developed in planes of dark wash remarkably similar to that of the present drawing (J. Bolten et al., Old Master Drawings from the Print Room of the University of Leiden, The Hague, 1986, no. 60).

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