1999.140: A Kneeling Youth; verso: A Seated Man holding a Glass

Govert Flinck first studied with the history painter Lambert Jacobsz. in Leeuwarden, where he met Jacob Backer (2013.170), then a senior pupil or assistant in Jacobsz.’s workshop. Around 1635–36, Flinck completed his training with Rembrandt, learning to imitate his master’s brushwork and color so skillfully that his pictures passed as originals by Rembrandt himself.¹ Eventually, wrote Arnold Houbraken, “with great effort and difficulty he turned away from [Rembrandt’s] way of painting.”² He developed a lighter, more Italianate style based on the work of Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck. During the 1640s and 1650s, Flinck attracted ever more prestigious commissions for portraits and history paintings, reaching the apogee of his career with the monumental canvases he produced for the Amsterdam Town Hall.³

A black-chalk composition of 1638 in the “Abrams Album” (see 1999.123.46 )⁴ is Flinck’s earliest dated drawing. However, many of his Rembrandtesque ink-and-wash sketches must date from 1635–40; at that time, his style adhered closely to the master’s, as evident in his early figure studies in red and black chalk.⁵ During the 1640s, Flinck, Backer, and other Amsterdam artists (2013.170, 1996.303) adopted the practice of drawing from nude and clothed models in black and white chalk on blue paper. In addition to improving their abilities to represent the human body, they studied figures in specific poses to prepare for the execution of paintings. Flinck’s works of this type are well documented; several bear his signature, and others relate directly to pictures by him.⁶

Although it is neither signed nor, to our knowledge, preparatory for a painting, Harvard’s study of a kneeling youth with his hands raised in prayer can be attributed to Flinck on the basis of its technique. The undulating contours of the costume, deeply scalloped folds of the sleeves, evocation of shadows with parallel diagonal strokes of black chalk, and flashy, scattered highlights recur in signed figure drawings by the artist. See, for example, his study of a seated, gesticulating youth in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem (Fig. 1).⁷ It is possible that the same model posed for both the Harvard and the Teylers studies. If so, they must have originated about the same time, and scholars have dated both drawings to the second half of the 1640s.⁸ Peter Schatborn has recently suggested that a drawing by Jacob Backer may depict the same young man.⁹

The Harvard sheet was neatly squared in graphite and the cells in the top row of the grid were numbered from 1 through 9, implying the artist’s intention to reproduce the figure on another support and a larger scale. If Flinck translated the study of a kneeling boy into a painted composition, the picture remains unidentified. Although the application of a grid to a finished study of a single figure is unusual in the work of a Dutch artist and—as far as we know—unique in Flinck’s oeuvre, Italian Renaissance painters such as Raphael, Fra Bartolommeo, and Tintoretto used this expedient, as did the seventeenth-century French master Simon Vouet.¹⁰

The lost drawing recorded by the counterproof on the verso of this sheet (Fig. 2), formerly regarded as by an unidentified hand, might well have been by Flinck.¹¹

Notes

¹ Arnold Houbraken, De groote Schouburgh der Nederlantsche Konstschilders en Schilderessen (First ed. 1718–21; reprint Amsterdam, 1943), vol. 2, pp. 20–21; Jaap van der Veen in Friso Lammertse and Jaap van der Veen, Uylenburgh & Son: Art and Commerce from Rembrandt to De Lairesse 1625–1675 (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery; Amsterdam: Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 2006), pp. 160–69.

² Houbraken, vol. 2, p. 21.

³ Werner Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt‑Schüler in vier Bänden (Landau, Germany, 1983), vol. 2, pp. 999–1001. Sumowski’s equivocal opinion of Flinck’s later work does not reflect the views of the artist’s elite patrons, who commissioned portraits and history paintings from him.

⁴ Govert Flinck, Man in Middle Eastern Costume Standing in a Landscape, 1638. Peter Schatborn, “The Early Rembrandtesque Drawings of Govert Flinck,” Master Drawings, vol. 48, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 4–38, pp. 7 and 13, repr. p. 4, fig. 1; William Robinson in Peter C. Sutton and William W. Robinson, Drawings by Rembrandt, His Students and Circle, from the Maida and George Abrams Collection, (Greenwich, Connecticut: Bruce Museum of Arts and Science; Houston: Museum of Fine Arts, 2011), cat. 23, pp. 84‑85.

⁵ On Flinck’s early Rembrandtesque drawings, see Schatborn, pp. 4–38. Schatborn discusses the figure studies in red and black chalk on pp. 7–10.

⁶ Werner Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School (New York, 1979), vol. 4, cats. 873, 876–82, 884–86, 892–94, 897, and 899–901.

⁷ Govert Flinck, Seated Youth (Fig. 1). Black and white chalk on blue paper; 299 × 235 mm. Signed, lower center, black chalk, G flinck. Haarlem, Teylers Museum, P+ 007. Michiel Plomp, The Dutch Drawings in the Teylers Museum (Ghent and Doornspijk, 1997), cat. 156, p. 159. For another drawing comparable in technique to the Harvard study, although not signed or connected to a painting, see Sumowski (1979), vol. 4, cat. 925x.

⁸ Sumowski (1979), vol. 4, cats. 884 and 924x. The connection of the Teylers drawing to Flinck’s Crucifixion painting of 1647 (Sumowski, 1983, vol. 2, cat. 630), which is usually cited to support the date of the drawing, is not compelling, but the date in the later 1640s for the Teylers sheet is very likely correct.

⁹ Peter Schatborn, Rembrandt and His Circle: Drawings in the Frits Lugt Collection (Bussum, Netherlands, 2010), vol. 1, p. 103.

¹⁰ See, for example, Chris Fischer, Fra Bartolommeo, Master Draughtsman of the High Renaissance: A selection from the Rotterdam Albums and Landscape Drawings from Various Collections (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen; New York: Pierpont Morgan Library; Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; Boston: Museum of Fine Arts; Copenhagen: Statens Museum for Kunst; Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1990), cats. 47 and 48, pp. 180–83, cat. 54, pp. 208–9, cat. 62, pp. 232–33, and cat. 93, pp. 337–38 (Fra Bartolommeo); Miguel Falomir, Tintoretto (Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2007), cats. 59–65, pp. 408–15 (Tintoretto); Barbara Brejon de Lavergnée, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins, Inventaire Général des Dessins, École Française: Dessins de Simon Vouet 1590–1649 (Paris, 1987), cat. 4, p. 45, cat. IV, pp. 46–47, cat. 66, pp. 88–89, cat. LIV, p. 96, cat. 73, p. 97, cat. 75, p. 98, cat. LV, p. 99, cat. 76, pp. 100–101, and cat. CXV, p. 151 (Vouet).

¹¹ Govert Flinck(?), A Seated Man Holding a Glass (Fig. 2). Sumowski (1979), vol. 4, under cat. 924x, p. 2014, described the counterproof as after an anonymous drawing. Peter Schatborn, in email correspondence with the author in November 2013, suggested that the lost drawing recorded in the counterproof should be attributed to Flinck.