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Identification and Creation

Object Number
1932.367
People
School of Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Dutch (Leiden 1606 - 1669 Amsterdam)
Previously attributed to Nicolaes Maes, Dutch (Dordrecht 1634 - 1693 Amsterdam)
Title
Elsje Christiaens Hanging on a Gibbet
Other Titles
Former Title: A Woman Hanging on the Gallows
Classification
Drawings
Work Type
drawing
Date
17th century
Culture
Dutch
Persistent Link
https://hvrd.art/o/298562

Physical Descriptions

Medium
Brown ink and brown wash on cream antique laid paper
Dimensions
16 × 9.4 cm (6 5/16 × 3 11/16 in.)
Inscriptions and Marks
  • watermark: Fragment of a foolscap with a seven-pointed collar. Related to Churchill 354 (1660).
  • collector's mark: lower right, black ink; brown ink, stamp; pen: L. 1015 [with associated number] 433 (Flury-Hérard)
  • collector's mark: lower right, purple ink, stamp: L. 991 (François Flameng)
  • collector's mark: lower right, black ink, stamp: L. 1143 (Charles-Joseph-Barthélémy Giraud)

Provenance

Recorded Ownership History
M. de Bourguignon de Fabregoules, Aix-en-Provence sold; to Charles-Joseph-Barthélémy Giraud, Aix-en-Provence and Paris (L. 1143, lower right) sold; to Prosper Flury-Hérard, Paris (L. 1015, lower right). Paul Mathey, Paris.* François Flameng, Paris. Charles A. Loeser, Florence, bequest; to Fogg Art Museum, 1932.

*Reference: Hofstede de Groot facsimile, 1903

Published Text

Catalogue
Drawings from the Age of Bruegel, Rubens, and Rembrandt: The Complete Collection Online
Authors
Multiple authors
Publisher
Harvard Art Museums (Cambridge, MA, 2017–)

Entry by William W. Robinson, completed May 13, 2019:

On May 1, 1664, Elsje Christiaens, an 18-year-old woman from Jutland, was publicly executed in Dam Square in Amsterdam for the murder of her landlady. Following her death by strangulation, Christiaens’s body and the ax she used in the crime were hung on a gallows on the Volewijck, a spit of land on the north bank of the IJ River, where the city authorities displayed the remains of executed malefactors as a warning to fellow citizens.1 Rembrandt made two drawings of Christiaens’s gibbeted corpse, one in which he depicted it frontally, and one in which he sketched it from the side.2 As Wilhelm R. Valentiner concluded in 1931, the Harvard drawing is a copy after Rembrandt’s frontal view by an unidentified pupil or close follower of the master.3 The tentative attribution of the Harvard copy to Nicolaes Maes cannot be sustained.4 Maes was Rembrandt’s pupil around 1650, while the copy must date from 1664 or later, and the technique of the copy shows no compelling similarity to the handling of Maes’s autograph drawings. Another copy, or later imitation, after the same Rembrandt original is in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, in Munich.5

The Harvard sheet and Rembrandt’s sketch of Elsje Christiaens from the side belonged to the same three French private collections (M. de Bourguignon de Fabregoules, Charles-Joseph-Barthélémy Giraud, and Prosper Flury-Hérard) during much of the 19th century.6

1 Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann et al., The Robert Lehman Collection, VII: Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Drawings. Central Europe, The Netherlands, France, England (New York and Princeton, N.J.: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, in association with Princeton University Press, 1999), pp. 232–33, under no. 72.

2 Otto Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, 6 vols. (London: Phaidon Press, 1954–57), vol. 5, cats. 1105, 1106. Haverkamp-Begemann et al., The Robert Lehman Collection, no. 72 and p. 233, Fig. 72.1.

3 William R. Valentiner, “Rembrandt Drawings in the Havemeyer Collection,” Metropolitan Museum Studies 3 (1931): 142.

4 The attribution to Maes has not been published but is recorded in the curatorial file on the drawing at the Harvard Art Museums.

5 Valentiner, “Rembrandt Drawings in the Havemeyer Collection,” pp. 142–43, Fig. 12. Wolfgang Wegner, Kataloge der Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung München: Die niederländischen Handzeichnungen des 15.–18. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Berlin: Gebr. Mann Verlag, 1973), vol. 1, cat. 1161, p. 169.

6 Haverkamp-Begemann et al., The Robert Lehman Collection, pp. 232 and 234, n. 4, under no. 72. Frits Lugt, Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d’estampes, online edition, Fondation Custodia, 2016, no. 1143, http://www.marquesdecollections.fr/detail.cfm/marque/7220/total/1 (accessed February 21, 2018).

Acquisition and Rights

Credit Line
Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Bequest of Charles A. Loeser
Accession Year
1932
Object Number
1932.367
Division
European and American Art
Contact
am_europeanamerican@harvard.edu
Permissions

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Publication History

  • Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Original Drawings by Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Martinus Nijhoff (The Hague, Netherlands, 1903), pl. 30a
  • Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Die Handzeichnungen Rembrandts, E. F. Bohn (Haarlem, 1906), no. 804
  • Corrado Ricci, Rembrandt in Italia, Alfieri & Lacroix (Milan, Italy, 1918), p. 58, repr. p. 69
  • William R. Valentiner, "Rembrandt Drawings in the Havermeyer Collection", Metropolitan Museum Studies, The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, NY, 1931), vol. 3, p. 142, repr. fig. 11
  • Otto Benesch, Rembrandt Werk und Forschung, Gilhofer & Ranschburg (Vienna, 1935), p. 49
  • Agnes Mongan and Paul J. Sachs, Drawings in the Fogg Museum of Art, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, 1940), vol. 1, cat. no. 515, p. 271; vol. 2, repr. fig. 261
  • An Exhibition of Dutch and Flemish Drawings and Watercolors, checklist, Unpublished (1954), cat. no. 85, p. 20
  • Otto Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, Phaidon Press (Oxford, 1954 - 1957), vol. 5, ad 1105, repr. p. 313
  • Felice Stampfle and Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Rembrandt Drawings from American Collections, exh. cat., The Morgan Library & Museum (New York, NY, 1960), p. 47, under no. 64
  • Seymour Slive, Drawings of Rembrandt, Dover Publications Inc. (New York, 1965), vol. 2, cat. no. 362, repr.
  • Wolfgang Wegner, Die niederlandischen Handzeichnungen des 15.-18. Jahrhunderts (Katalogue der Staatlichen Graphischen Sammlung, Munchen), Mann (Berlin, Germany, 1973), vol. 1, p. 169, under no. 1161
  • Walter Liedtke, Carolyn Logan, and Nadine Orenstein, Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt in the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Aspects of Connoisseurship, exh. cat., The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, 1995), vol. 2, p. 172, n. 4
  • Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann, Mary Tavener Holmes, Fritz Koreny, Donald Posner, and Duncan Robinson, The Robert Lehman Collection VII: Fifteenth- to Eighteenth-Century European Drawings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Princeton University Press (New York and Princeton, 1999), p. 234, n. 4 and n. 9
  • Carlo Francini, "L'inventario della collezione Loeser alla Villa Gattaia", Bollettino della Società di Studi Fiorentini (2000), no. 6, p. 122 ("Cartella C.L.")
  • Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d'Estampes, website, Fondation Custodia, 2015, under nos. 991 and 1143

Exhibition History

  • An Exhibition of Dutch and Flemish Drawings and Watercolors, Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, 04/01/1954 - 04/30/1954
  • Golden Times? Art and Society in Rembrandt‘s Amsterdam“, Städel Museum, Frankfurt am Main, 11/27/2024 - 03/23/2025

Subjects and Contexts

  • Dutch, Flemish, & Netherlandish Drawings

Verification Level

This record has been reviewed by the curatorial staff but may be incomplete. Our records are frequently revised and enhanced. For more information please contact the Division of European and American Art at am_europeanamerican@harvard.edu