1957.221: Seated Man

Painter and etcher Adriaen van de Velde specialized in pastoral landscapes, often with Italianate settings. He also depicted beaches, winter scenes, portraits, and biblical and mythological subjects.¹ He ranks among the most versatile Dutch draftsmen of the 17th century. His extensive oeuvre of drawings includes landscape sketches, compositional projects for paintings and prints, a few finished watercolors, and detailed studies of figures and animals. More than 50 drawings relating to Van de Velde’s paintings and etchings have survived, affording a rare glimpse of the working process of a Dutch landscapist.²

The large format and use of charcoal as the primary medium in the Harvard drawing are exceptional for the artist, who usually drew his figure studies on smaller sheets of white or brown paper in red or black chalk. Van de Velde used this study for the figure of Battus in a painting that depicts the myth of Mercury and Battus (Ovid, Metamorphoses, Book, 2, lines 676–707). Two versions of the painting survive. One version, last recorded in a 1943 London sale, is signed and dated 1671, while the other—signed, but not dated—belongs to the Národní galerie Praha, in Prague (Fig. 1).³

In the painting, Battus, whose cloak is bright red, sits on a boulder. He gestures toward his seat, as in the drawing, capturing the moment when Battus is swearing to Mercury that the rock will speak before he betrays where Mercury has hidden the cattle he stole from Apollo. Later, Mercury returns in a different guise, tricks Battus into revealing the herd’s whereabouts, and turns him to stone. Van de Velde reproduced the drawing faithfully on the canvas, making only minor adjustments to the head and beard. A composition sketch for the painting belongs to the heirs of Victor de Stuers, at the estate of Huis “De Wiersse,” Vorden, in the Netherlands.⁴ A drawing in red chalk by Van de Velde in the Art Gallery of Ontario depicts the same model in a different pose, and the figure of Saint Jerome in a painting dated 1668 may be based on a lost study of the same elderly man.⁵

Van de Velde’s pupil Dirk van Bergen (c. 1645–1690) inherited, or had access to, his teacher’s studio estate after Adriaen’s death in January 1672. Van Bergen traveled to England in the winter of 1672–73, perhaps in the company of Adriaen’s father and brother (marine painters Willem van de Velde the Elder and Willem the Younger), and temporarily pursued his career there.⁶ In the 1670s, he painted several pastoral landscapes for the decoration of Ham House (Richmond, Surrey). One of these, an overdoor in the “White Closet,” still in situ, is a variant of Van de Velde’s Mercury and Battus; its figure of Battus depends closely on the Harvard drawing.⁷

¹ Bart Cornelis and Marijn Schapelhouman, Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape (London: Paul Holberton Publishing, 2016), pp. 11–39.

² On Van de Velde’s drawings, see Peter Schatborn, “‘De Hut’ van Adriaen van de Velde,” Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 23 (3) (1975): 159–65; William W. Robinson, “Preparatory Drawings by Adriaen van de Velde,” Master Drawings 17 (1) (Spring 1979): 3–23; Peter Schatborn, Dutch Figure Drawings from the Seventeenth Century (Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum; Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981), pp. 116–19; Angelique van den Eerenbeemd, “Adriaen van de Velde: De Italianiserende tekeningen: een onderzoek naar de herkomst van enkele motieven,” Ph.D. dissertation, Radboud University Nijmegen, 2000; Angelique van den Eerenbeemd, “De Italianiserende Tekeningen van Adriaen van de Velde,” Delineavit et Sculpsit 30 (November 2006): 1–64; and Cornelis and Schapelhouman, Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape, pp. 141–215.

³ Adriaen van de Velde, Mercury and Battus, oil on canvas, 77.5 × 105.5 cm, signed and dated 1671 according to the sale catalogue, Christie’s, London, 16 July 1943, lot 15. Adriaen van de Velde, Mercury and Battus, oil on canvas, 84.5 × 101 cm, signed A. van de Velde, Prague, Národní galerie Praha, O 9325 (formerly DO 5680, no. 97). Jaromir Síp, Dutch Painting (London: Spring Books, 1961), no. 13, n.p.; Robinson, “Preparatory Drawings,” p. 6, Fig. 2, pp. 15, 20, under no. B-16; Anja Ševčik, Hana Seifertová, and Stefan Bartilla, National Gallery in Prague: Dutch Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Prague: National Gallery in Prague, 2012), 440–41, in which Stefan Bartilla traces the confused provenances of the two versions of the painting.

⁴ Robinson, “Preparatory Drawings,” pp. 6, 15, 19–20, no. B-16, pl. 2a.

⁵ Odilia Bonebakker in Drawing Attention: Selected Works on Paper from the Renaissance to Modernism, ed. Katharine A. Lochnan (Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario, 2008), p. 72; Cornelis and Schapelhouman, Adriaen van de Velde: Dutch Master of Landscape, p. 17, Fig. 8.

⁶ Marieke de Kinkeder, “Dirck van Bergen,” RKD–Netherlands Institute for Art History, 2014, https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/Bergen%2C%20Dirck%20van (accessed February 17, 2018).

⁷ Landscape with Mercury and Battus and Animals, oil on canvas, 47 × 151.1 cm, Surrey, The National Trust, Ham House, NT 1140142. For all of Van Bergen’s paintings in Ham House see this page.