Entry by
Austeja Mackelaite,
completed November 01, 2017:
Trained as an engraver in the workshop of his stepfather, Hendrick Goltzius, Jacob Matham shared his master’s penchant for the virtuosic drawn line. His sizable corpus of drawings is dominated by highly finished signed and dated sheets, including a number of penwerken — highly accomplished pen drawings that imitate the linear swells, tapers, and stipples of the engraving technique. This notoriously demanding technique, which required the draftsman to work with no corrections, was a career-long preoccupation for Goltzius. Matham’s work in this manner is clearly indebted to his master’s example.
In 1600, Matham began producing busts and half-length figure studies depicting men and women in archaizing costumes and very elaborate head garments, usually seen in profile. Mostly executed in the manner of engravings, the drawings had their conceptual origins in Goltzius’s “imaginary portraits” that had emerged just a few years before. The Harvard Art Museums sheet is an excellent early example of Matham’s work in this genre. The artist employed swelling and tapering parallel and cross-hatched lines of varying length and thickness to describe the expressive topography of the man’s face, including the delicate clusters of wrinkles around his right eye. While Matham’s careful study imitates the linear effects of engraving, his overall approach is significantly freer and does not exactly replicate the burin technique he used in that medium, in which undulating lines are generally interwoven with stipples, creating a lattice-like effect.
The lack of exaggeration in the rendering of the man’s features and his contemporary costume have led to the intriguing suggestion that the Harvard sheet might be a depiction of an actual person. Yet, as Emil Karel Josef Reznicek showed in his discussion of Goltzius’s heads, when one is unable to determine the identity of a sitter, it can be virtually impossible to differentiate between studies made from life and imaginary portraits. Indeed, some of the man’s facial features—the pronounced, pointy chin and the fleshy jowl, all covered in stubble—appear in other head studies, calling the distinctiveness of the figure’s physiognomy into question. The profile view, which Matham adopted for this drawing, is much more common among imaginary portraits than drawings and prints depicting actual sitters. When the sheet is examined under infrared light, a black chalk underdrawing shows that Matham made very significant changes when rendering the contour of the head as well as the costume, which also points to the drawing’s invented nature.
A close copy of the drawing is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Because the composition is much weaker than the Harvard sheet, it’s possible that a member of Matham’s circle produced it for training purposes. That such a copy exists and the fact that at least two of Matham’s imaginary portraits had been published and disseminated in print confirm that there was a taste for his inventive head studies among his contemporaries.
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