Lot 77: PHILIPS KONINCK AMSTERDAM 1619 - 1688

black chalk

157 by 86mm

Thomas Hudson (L.2432);
Sir Joshua Reynolds (L. 2364);
The Palmer Collection;
Thence by inheritance to the present owners

Although the handling is in many respects similar to that seen in some of Rembrandt's earlier black chalk figure studies (such as the kneeling male figure, Benesch 58, now in the Abrams Collection), aspects of the facial type and the morphology of the hands in particular, indicate that this drawing, though extremely fine, is not by Rembrandt himself.

Amongst Rembrandt's pupils and associates, the one who most frequently drew figures as freely, energetically and powerfully as we see here was Philips Koninck, and that artist's figure types also often share the slight elongation of body and angularity of facial features that characterise the present figure. Almost all of Koninck's surviving figure drawings are, however, executed in pen and wash, rather than black chalk, and there is only one published example of a black chalk figure study of this type by Koninck, the signed and dated 1662 drawing of a Young Man with a Headband, half-length, facing towards the left, in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (see W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, vol. VI, New York 1982, no. 1341). The suggestion that the present drawing is also by Koninck was, however, made independently by several scholars, and has been confirmed, on the basis of a photograph, by Prof. Werner Sumowski.

Amongst the many pen drawings by the artist to which this can be compared, we can cite in particular the signed sheets in Dresden and in The Pierpont Morgan Library, New York (Sumowski 1320, 1342, 1348) and further, unsigned drawings in Nuremberg, Berlin and Munich (Sumowski 1374^X , 1380^X, 1406^X). Sumowski dates all these drawings, and also the present study, to the late 1650s, some time after Koninck's closest involvement with the art of Rembrandt, but at a point when he was still looking fairly closely at the master's style.