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A woman in profile kneeling and facing a child standing with a walking stick.

A woman, seen in profile, facing to the left, wears a hooded cape and kneels beside a small child. The woman places her proper right hand on his back and in her other hand holds the child’s proper left hand.

Identification and Creation

Object Number
2020.208
People
Jacques de Gheyn II, Dutch (Antwerp, Netherlands 1565 - 1629 The Hague, Netherlands)
Title
A Roma Woman with a Child
Classification
Drawings
Work Type
drawing
Date
c. 1604
Culture
Dutch
Persistent Link
https://hvrd.art/o/212688

Physical Descriptions

Medium
Brown ink and black chalk on light tan antique laid paper
Dimensions
16.2 x 13.1 cm (6 3/8 x 5 3/16 in.)
Inscriptions and Marks
  • inscription: lower left, brown ink: J:d:Gijn f
  • inscription: verso, lower left, brown ink: gheyn
  • collector's mark: verso, lower center, blue ink stamp: L. 3306 (Maida and George Abrams)
  • inscription: verso, upper right, underneath mount: DE GHEYN
  • watermark: none

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History
Comtesse B. B. de Maigret. [Adolphe Stein, Switzerland], sold; to Maida and George Abrams, Boston, 1981 (L. 3306, verso, lower center), gift; to Harvard Art Museums, 2020

Published Text

Catalogue
Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums
Authors
William W. Robinson and Susan Anderson
Publisher
Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA, 2016)

Catalogue entry no. 39 by William W. Robinson:

This touching image belongs to a group of four closely related studies by De Gheyn, executed in the same media and on similar paper, of Roma women and children (Fig. 1).1 De Gheyn worked on a coarse, fibrous paper in gallnut ink over a preliminary sketch in black chalk, from which the pen work departs in places. With its profuse, rhythmic zigzags and long, curvilinear strokes that evoke the swelling forms of the woman’s skirt and cape, the study exemplifies his mature technique, which derives from pen drawings of the 1590s by Hendrick Goltzius.2

The Roma migrated from India and arrived in northern Europe during the Middle Ages. In the Netherlands they were known as “heathens” and, because of their supposed country of origin, “Egyptians,” a misconception from which the English “gypsy” derives.3 Due to their unconventional dress, language, and customs, as well as their disregard for local ordinances, they were banished from the towns and condemned to a marginal life of wandering and camping in the countryside.4 During the 1590s, scholars at the University of Leiden studied the language and customs of the Roma—an interest that De Gheyn, with his close connections to the university, evidently shared.5

De Gheyn’s studies culminated in two prints designed, but not engraved, by him. His drawings objectively record the distinctive clothing and physiognomies of the Roma, and the tender solicitude of the mother in the Harvard sheet, who wears the cape and headdress typical of Roma costume, attests to the draftsman’s empathy for his exotic subjects. However, the prints—like works by Hendrick Avercamp, Jan Miense Molenaer, Georges de la Tour, and other artists of the early seventeenth century—cast them in their conventional roles as social outcasts who survived by deceit, begging, and petty crimes. In one engraving after De Gheyn, four Roma women and two children stop on a road near a farmhouse to prepare a meal. The farmer and his wife watch them suspiciously from their property, while their dog approaches the strangers, snarling aggressively.6 The other print depicts an expensively dressed Dutch woman, who pays a disheveled Roma crone to tell her fortune (Fig. 2).7 It is one of the earliest of many seventeenth-century Dutch works that feature a Roma fortune teller.8 The text beneath the image does not address the social stigma of the Roma, but rather deplores the gullibility of the young woman: instead of consulting a surgeon about her malady, she resorts to a fortune teller to “hear those things from the future that she wishes to hear.”9 De Gheyn based the figure of the boy at the right edge of the engraving on the youth he had sketched in the Chicago drawing (see Fig. 1), the only detail among the four surviving studies that he translated directly into a print. The engraving, attributed to Andries Jacobsz. Stock, dates from about 1608, but De Gheyn probably executed the four studies of Roma women and children a few years earlier.10 Van Regteren Altena noted that Hendrick Goudt drew an exact copy of the boy in the Chicago drawing.11 If Goudt copied the figure before he departed, probably in 1604, for a protracted sojourn in Rome, the Chicago sheet and the other three studies of Roma women and children must date from that year at the latest.12

Notes

1 Jacques de Gheyn II, Two Studies of a Roma Woman and a Roma Boy in a Large Hat (Fig. 1). Brown ink over black chalk. 227 × 259 mm. Art Institute of Chicago, 1959.2. I. Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations (The Hague, Boston, and London, 1983), vol. 2, cat. II 535, p. 88. The other two drawings are ibid., cats. II 536–37, p. 88.

2 An example, dated 1596, of the type of Goltzius drawing that De Gheyn emulated is in the Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston. See William W. Robinson, Bruegel to Rembrandt: Dutch and Flemish Drawings from the Maida and George Abrams Collection (London: British Museum; Paris: Institut Néerlandais; Cambridge: Harvard University Art Museums, Fogg Art Museum, 2002), cat. 23, pp. 70–71, repr.

3 J. A. Poot in A. Th. van Deursen, Emil Karel Josef Reznicek, et al., Jacques de Gheyn II, 1565–1629: Drawings (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans van Beuningen; Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 1985), under cat. 63, p. 68.

4 Van Regteren Altena, vol. 1, p. 89; J. A. Poot in Van Deursen et al., under cat. 63, p. 68; Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (New York, 1987) pp. 595–96; Cynthia von Bogendorf Rupprath in Pieter Biesboer and Martina Sitt, Von Frans Hals bis Jan Steen: vergnügliches Leben, verborgene Lust: holländische Gesellschaftsszenen (Haarlem: Frans Hals Museum; Hamburg: Hamburger Kunsthalle, 2003), under cat. 30, pp. 146–49.

5 Van Regteren Altena, vol. 1, p. 89; J. A. Poot in Van Deursen et al., under cat. 63, p. 68.

6 Carlos van Hasselt and Mària van Berge-Gerbaud, Le héraut du dix‑septième siècle: Dessins et gravures de Jacques de Gheyn II et III de la Fondation Custodia, Collection Frits Lugt (Paris: Institut Néerlandais, 1985), cat. 43, p. 82. The verses beneath this print acknowledge the plight of the Roma as religious refugees harried from their native soil and forced to live among uncouth country people in foreign lands.

7 Andries Jacobsz. Stock(?), after Jacques de Gheyn II, The Fortune Teller (Fig. 2). Engraving. 304 × 206 mm. London, The British Museum, 1873,0809.469. Jan Piet Filedt Kok and Marjolein Leesberg in New Hollstein, De Gheyn Family, part 2, no. 154, p, 233, dated to circa 1608. The model for the engraving is in Braunschweig, Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum; see Van Regteren Altena, vol. 2, cat. II 534, pp. 87–88.

8 For De Gheyn’s seminal contribution to this iconographic tradition, see Ger Luijten in Eddy de Jongh and Ger Luijten, Mirror of Everyday Life: Genre Prints in the Netherlands 1550–1700 (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 1987), under cat. 22, p. 135; Cynthia von Bogendorf Rupprath in Biesboer and Sitt, under cat. 30, p. 146.

9 Ger Luijten in De Jongh and Luijten, under cat. 22, p. 133.

10 The engraving is dated to circa 1608 by Jan Piet Filedt Kok and Marjolein Leesberg (part 2, no. 154, p. 233), as well as by Ger Luijten (De Jongh and Luijten, cat. 22, p. 133).

11 Van Regteren Altena, vol. 1, p. 159, and repr. p. 156, ill. 117.

12 Joachim Jacoby, Die Zeichnungen von Adam Elsheimer: Kritischer Katalog (Frankfurt am Main: Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 2008), p. 45. On the basis of Marten Jan Bok’s review of the documents related to Goudt, Jacoby gives the date of Goudt’s departure for Rome as “probably” (vermutlich) 1604. Van Regteren Altena, vol. 1, p. 159, dated Goudt’s departure to, at the latest, 1606. Goudt returned to the Netherlands, settling in Utrecht, by 1612.

Figures

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line
The Maida and George Abrams Collection, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, Gift of George Abrams in memory of Maida Stocker Abrams
Accession Year
2020
Object Number
2020.208
Division
European and American Art
Contact
am_europeanamerican@harvard.edu
Permissions

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Publication History

  • I. Q. van Regteren Altena, Jacques de Gheyn: Three Generations, M. Nijhoff Publishers (The Hague, Boston and London, 1983), vol. 2, cat. no. Add. 3, p. 182, repr. vol. 3, p. 284, pl. 3 (Add.3)
  • A. Th. van Deursen and Emil Karel Josef Reznicek, Jacques de Gheyn II: Drawings, exh. cat., Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (Rotterdam, The Netherlands, 1985), cat. no. 61 and under cat. no. 62, p. 67, repr. fig. 61
  • Institut Néerlandais, Le Héraut du Dix-Septième Siècle. Dessins et gravures de Jacuqes de Gheyn II..., exh. cat., Institut Néerlandais (Paris, France, 1985), under cat. no. 26, p. 69 (n. 2)
  • George Abrams, "Collectors and Collecting", Drawings Defined, ed. Walter Strauss, Abaris Books (New York, 1987), pp. 415-429, p. 417, repr. p. 420, fig. 4
  • Frederik J. Duparc, "[Review] Collectie Abrams in Rijksprentenkabinet", Tableau (1991), vol. 13, no. 5, pp. 40-42, p. 41, repr. p. 42
  • William W. Robinson, Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings: A Selection from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, exh. cat., H. O. Zimman, Inc. (Lynn, MA, 1991), cat. no. 10, pp. 38-39, repr.
  • Daniel Gross, "Dutch Treats", Harvard Magazine (Cambridge, MA, September-October 1992), vol. 95, no. 1, pp. 41-45, p. 45, repr. p. 42
  • William W. Robinson, "Abrams Dutch Drawings Given to the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, Mass.", Apollo (December 1999), vol. 150, pp. 14-16, pp. 15-16, repr. p. 16, fig. 4
  • Bobbie Leigh and Rebecca Dimling Cochran, "The Top 100 Collectors in America", Art & Antiques (March 2003), vol. 26, no. 3, entire issue, repr. p. 79
  • Annemarie Stefes, Niederländische Zeichnungen 1450-1850: Kupferstichkabinett der Hamburger Kunsthalle, ed. Andreas Stolzenburg and Hubertus Gaßner, Böhlau Verlag (Cologne, 2011), vol. 1, under cat. no. 29, p. 79 (n. 2)
  • William W. Robinson and Susan Anderson, Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: Highlights from the Collection of the Harvard Art Museums, Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA, 2016), p. 19; cat. no. 39, pp. 142-144, repr. p. 143
  • Joanna Sheers Seidenstein, Cornelis Visscher's 'Roma Mother with Children:' Transforming a Prototype by Jacques de Gheyn", Master Drawings (Spring 2022), vol. 60, no. 1, pp. 87-90, p. 90, note 13
  • Emily J. Peters and Laura M. Ritter, Tales of the City: Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel, exh. cat., Cleveland Museum of Art and Yale University Press (Cleveland, 2022), pp. 206-207, repr. p. 206 as fig. 1

Exhibition History

Subjects and Contexts

  • Dutch, Flemish, & Netherlandish Drawings

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Verification Level

This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of European and American Art at am_europeanamerican@harvard.edu