Catalogue entry no. 18 by Susan Anderson:
Jacob Cats was apprenticed first to a fabric merchant and then to a bookbinder, but following his youthful talent for drawing, he went on to learn engraving under Abraham Starre and drawing with Pieter Louw. Like his Amsterdam colleague and collaborator Egbert van Drielst (see 1980.10), Cats spent the early years of his career producing decorative wall paintings—initially under Gerard van Rossum, then with Jan Hendrik Troost van Groenendoelen, and later in his own workshop. Toward the end of the century, when the vogue for grand paintings waned, he turned instead to finished drawings. His landscape drawings, especially, fetched high prices even during his lifetime, and he was commissioned to execute watercolor copies of esteemed paintings from the Golden Age.
Cats’s inscription on the verso of this sheet locates the scene in the vicinity of Wijk aan Duin, a sparsely populated area now part of the municipality of Beverwijk. Lying in the northern portion of Kennemerland—lands in and around Haarlem—the dunefilled wilderness of this region had offered recreational hunting grounds since medieval times. This area’s attractive contrast of meadows, woods, and dunes inspired literary praise and contributed to the development of what is now considered “Dutch” landscape beginning in the late sixteenth century, from Hendrick Goltzius’s plein-air drawings, to print series of “pleasant places” by Claes Jansz. Visscher and others, to Jacob van Ruisdael’s breathtaking, distant city views. In the years leading up to Cats’s career, subjects and themes from the Golden Age had come to the fore as hallmarks of a national school worthy of revival. Cats himself followed seventeenth-century artists by depicting scenes of this dune region several times, inscribing the locations on this and other such sheets (Fig. 1).
Although Cats also drew more conventional representations of urban winter scenes, with their merriment and commercial bustle on the river or harbor, here and in other winter drawings he has depicted the harsher toll the season takes on rural travelers. The hunter and his boy tuck their hands within their coats at the lower right, the horse-drawn party huddles in its carriage, and the man on horseback arrives at a sturdy dwelling with the smoke of its warm fire emanating from the chimney.
Cats’s finished drawings range in tonality from a rainbow of watercolor to gray monochrome. In the Harvard sheet, he astutely chose brown ink and shades of gray wash to give this scene an eye-catching contrast of color while matching winter’s somber sheen. As in other winter landscapes by Cats, here he rendered the areas of snow by reserving the white paper between his applications of ink and wash. His representation of the delicate adherence of fresh snow to the bare, intricate tree branches is especially masterful.
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