Catalogue entry no. 24 by William W. Robinson:
The son of a successful cabinetmaker who fashioned ebony and whalebone into frames and other luxury furnishings, Lambert Doomer enjoyed a comfortable income that evidently enabled him to practice his art as an amateur, albeit a talented and productive one. Documents from his lifetime refer to him as “painter,” and over the course of his long career he executed dozens of pictures that represent a wide range of subjects. Doomer’s oeuvre of more than four hundred drawings includes biblical and mythological compositions, genre scenes, copies after other artists, and a few studies of figures and animals. However, the vast majority depict landscapes, and they constitute his principal contribution to seventeenth-century Dutch art.
We have no conclusive evidence of Doomer’s training. While he must have known Rembrandt, who painted portraits of his parents, the assumption that Doomer was his pupil in the early 1640s remains unproven. He eventually adopted Rembrandt’s drawing technique and emulated his landscape compositions, but this probably occurred only after he acquired five albums of drawings from the sales of Rembrandt’s goods in 1657 and 1658.
Most of Doomer’s landscapes—including those he copied after other artists, as well as those based on his own studies—represent sites in France, Germany, Central Europe, and the Netherlands. His works of this type responded to Dutch collectors’ avid interest in topographical images during the latter half of the seventeenth century (see 2011.516). A few drawings feature motifs, such as the unpretentious cottage depicted in the Harvard work, that seem too commonplace to have figured in a collection of topographically significant material.
Singled out by several authorities as a surpassing example of Doomer’s draftsmanship, Cottage with a Bleaching Yard probably dates from the early 1660s. Its composition and technique are comparable to those of landscapes executed in 1663 during the artist’s trip to the eastern Netherlands and the Rhineland. The impressive scale and close, frontal view of the cottage recall his expansive rendering of the buildings in works such as Dymbkes Gate in Anrath (Fig. 1). The pen work of the foliage and the clearly defined contours, as well as the skillful blending of the rose-brown and gray washes that evoke the weathered textures of walls and chimneys, are comparable to Doomer’s handling of the media in this and other drawings from the Rhine journey.
In the right foreground, a woman, assisted by a man who holds a basket, spreads clothing or pieces of unfinished linen on the ground. Doomer quoted her figure from a painting of a slaughtered ox hanging in an interior, where a woman bends down to wipe the animal’s blood from the floor. Although formerly attributed to Rembrandt, the picture is now regarded as a product of his workshop or school (Fig. 2). Doomer might have owned this painting. Seventeenth-century images of linen bleaching almost invariably depicted the fields outside Haarlem, the area that dominated the industry. Although the view in Doomer’s drawing is too limited to identify the location, it is possible, even likely, that the cottage and the structures behind it belonged to a bleaching operation on the outskirts of that city.
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