Catalogue entry no. 26 by Susan Anderson:
Egbert van Drielst spent the early portion of his career steeped in decorative traditions. First apprenticed in Groningen in the lacquer factory of Steven Numan, with drawing and painting instruction from Johannes Franciscus Francé, Van Drielst soon moved to Haarlem to produce painted wall decorations (behangsel schilderijen), which were popular and lucrative during the first half of the eighteenth century, under Jan Augustini (1725–1773). After relocating to Amsterdam in 1765, Van Drielst continued this line of work with Jan Smeijers (1741–1813), studied open-air drawing in and around Haarlem with the landscape painter Hendrik Meijer (1744–1793), and entered Amsterdam’s drawing academy and Guild of Saint Luke in 1768. Van Drielst began creating independent landscape drawings around 1770, which helped secure his place as a leader in the late eighteenth-century Golden Age revival. Such subjects earned him the nickname the “Drentse Hobbema,” a moniker referring to landscapist Meindert Hobbema (1638–1709), whose work he admired, and the Dutch province of Drenthe, whose landscape he frequently sketched and depicted in finished drawings.
This large, intricate sheet, awash with golden light, references instead Dutch Italianate painting of the Golden Age. The source for Harvard’s Shepherd and Shepherdess was likely a work by Jan Both (c. 1618–1652), Landscape with Bathers (Fig. 1), which includes comparable elements, such as the archway in ruins and the large tree. The figure of the gesturing shepherdess, however, was probably taken from Nicholas Berchem’s oil painting Landscape with Nymphs and Satyrs (1645). Another drawing by Van Drielst with the same size and media— A Landscape with Travellers Resting near a Tree, a Bridge, and Hills in the Background —was signed and dated 1780 (Fig. 2). Last known to be at the gallery of Kate de Rothschild, London, it represents a similar subject with complementary compositional strategies: a small group of figures appear in the foreground, bracketed by tall trees on one side and architectural elements behind them on the other, with the view receding to mountains in the background. As in Shepherd and Shepherdess, Jan Both provided inspiration for the De Rothshild sheet, in this case with a painting on copper, now in the Rijksmuseum, that depicts a very similar composition in reverse. The two drawings were almost certainly conceived as pendants, as they appeared together under lot 4 in Jan van Dijk’s 1791 sale, just eleven years after their creation, and again with Schaeffer Galleries in 1980.
In addition to adapting Both’s compositions and motifs, Van Drielst clearly felt the influence of the drawing technique that Both had practiced, and that was emulated by his many seventeenth- and eighteenth-century followers, such as Willem de Heusch and Hendrick Verschuring. In Both’s landscape drawings, he typically combined diffuse brown or gray wash and concentrated strokes of the brush, with or without an underdrawing in black chalk or graphite. As a characteristic touch of warmth, he often added an energetic layer of pen and brown ink details atop a cooler composition of gray. The resulting lively, dappled, and often angular depiction of foreground foliage recedes softly into an atmospheric background, frequently mountainous, with a sky touched by diffuse passing clouds. Van Drielst maintained Both’s layered approach to contrasting foliage and his use of wash to create atmospheric perspective. In keeping with the eighteenth-century taste for refinement, though, he exercised a crisper, more controlled application of ink and wash to the contours of his trees, figures, and architectural elements, as seen in Harvard’s sheet.
Although many of Van Drielst’s painted wall decorations for Amsterdam homes no longer survive, he is known to have collaborated with Jacob Cats (see 2004.74) on such projects. In light of this artistic relationship and Cats’s surviving classical landscapes, Gerlagh and Koolhaas-Grosfeld suggest that Van Drielst’s Both-inspired drawings, despite their lack of squaring, may be considered cogent comparisons for his own schemes that are now lost. Although this might be true, Van Drielst may have intended them to be enjoyed as works of art in their own right.
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