Entry by
Susan Anderson,
completed November 01, 2017:
In correspondence with the Harvard Art Museums in 1983, Bernhard Schnackenburg, author of the 1981 monograph on the drawings of Adriaen and Isaac van Ostade, described this sheet as a copy after a lost drawing by Adriaen. Although the work is very like Adriaen’s drawings of the 1660s in style, subject matter, and size (see, for example, his drawing of three peasant men in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin), the treatment of the figures, especially the faces, is not characteristic of the master. Schnackenburg suggested that Adriaen’s last student, Cornelis Dusart, could perhaps be its author, but the rendering of details such as the faces, hands, and feet is not typical of him. Given the drawing’s close stylistic similarities to both artists, our anonymous draftsman likely lived during the latter half of the 17th century and probably during Van Ostade’s lifetime. Even though he or she may have copied directly from a lost drawing by Adriaen, it is also worth considering that our sheet may instead be a pastiche of Van Ostade–like elements. For example, the figure of an old woman wearing a long head covering is very similar to one in Van Ostade’s print Three Grotesque Figures (though in reverse; S5.17.6); the mother and the child are reminiscent of a similar pair in a Van Ostade drawing in Frankfurt; and the woman gathering material in her apron resembles a figure in a Van Ostade sketch in Oxford.
It has been suggested that the gray wash is a later addition. Given the careful application of the wash and the way in which it plays an integral role in the composition and delineation of the figures, however, it is likely that the hand that applied the brown ink lines also applied the gray wash and at the same moment.
Notes
