1994.143: A Draped Male Figure Holding a Staff (John the Baptist?)

This study belonged in the eighteenth century to three British portraitists who formed important collections of Anthony van Dyck’s drawings. Jonathan Richardson, Sr. (1667–1745) accumulated about one-sixth of the oeuvre known today, including nearly half of the surviving studies for the formal, commissioned portraits Van Dyck painted in Flanders and England from 1627 until the end of his life.¹ At the 1747 sale of Richardson’s collection, his pupil and son-in-law, Thomas Hudson (1701–1779), acquired more than thirty Van Dyck drawings; most of those, including the Harvard sheet, then passed at the sale of Hudson’s estate to his pupil, Joshua Reynolds (1723–1792).² That the museums’ study belonged to this core group of Van Dyck’s works does not guarantee its authenticity, but the early provenance adds weight to the attribution based on comparing it to securely autograph drawings.³

When the Harvard sheet came to light again at a 1971 sale, it was still on Richardson’s mount, which he had inscribed with Van Dyck’s name. The sale catalogue identified the subject as Paris, the Trojan prince whose abduction of Helen, wife of the Spartan king Menelaus, precipitated the epic war with the Greeks.⁴ Paris was raised by shepherds, and in a painting in the Wallace Collection, London, Van Dyck depicted him as a handsome, muscular youth, partially draped, with a herder’s staff in the crook of his arm (Fig. 1).⁵ Jo Hedley, who convincingly dated the picture to around 1628, related the Harvard drawing to it, not as a direct preparatory study but as an earlier, conventional sketch of Paris that Van Dyck developed into the more poetic figure on the canvas.⁶

Despite its apparent similarity to Paris, the museums’ study probably postdates that painting by a few years and represents Saint John the Baptist rather than the shepherd–prince of Troy. The figure of Paris-with its robust modeling, showy drapery, elegantly curled left arm, cocked head, and spatial penetration—conforms to Van Dyck’s style of the later 1620s.⁷ His dynamic pose differs from that of the man in the drawing, whose erect posture, nearly frontal stance, and restrained gesture recall the portraits painted in England during the following decade (Fig. 2).⁸ Additionally, the broad, loose strokes of the black chalk, minimal modeling, and limited use of white-chalk highlights in the drawing compare well with the summary handling of sketches preparatory for portraits of the 1630s.⁹ As a study of a seminude model, however, the Harvard work surely relates to a history painting, not a portrait. The pointing fingers, staff, and simple drapery identify the subject as John the Baptist. In countless works of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art, John is depicted as a single figure in the wilderness or against a neutral background, gesturing toward a lamb or the cross on his staff, an allusion to Christ’s sacrifice. In his life of the artist published in 1672, Giovanni Pietro Bellori recorded a Saint John the Baptist in the Desert among the devotional pictures Van Dyck produced in England for a Catholic patron, Sir Kenelm Digby.¹⁰ Bellori’s source is unimpeachable: he met Digby in Rome in 1645 and/or 1647, and the Englishman gave him detailed information on Van Dyck’s career in London. Portraits commissioned by Digby date from about 1632 to 1638, but none of the devotional works Van Dyck painted for him have come to light.¹¹ If Van Dyck produced the museums’ drawing as a study for Digby’s Saint John the Baptist in the Desert, it is our only visual record of the picture.¹²

Notes

¹ These estimates are based on Horst Vey’s 1962 catalogue of Van Dyck’s drawings, Die Zeichnungen Anton van Dycks (Brussels, 1962). The number of drawings for commissioned, painted portraits does not include studies for the Iconography. Of the studies for formal portraits catalogued by Vey (vol. 1, cats. 177–241, pp. 247–309), Richardson owned more than forty percent. He had started collecting as early as 1688, evidently tapping reliable sources for his impressive cache of Van Dycks, but we cannot identify those sources, apart from the ten sheets that came from Prosper Henry Lankrink (1628–1692), a landscape painter employed in the London studio of Peter Lely. See Vey, vol. 1, cats. 14, 77, 130, 172, 189, 190, 194, 210, 294, and 302. Richardson’s sale catalogue records many more Van Dyck drawings in his collection than the fifty-five catalogued by Vey; Carol Gibson-Wood, “‘A Judiciously Disposed Collection’: Jonathan Richardson Senior’s Cabinet of Drawings,” in Collecting Prints and Drawings in Europe, c. 1500–1750 (Aldershot, England and Burlington, Vermont, 2003): 155–72, pp. 155–56.

² The catalogue of the Reynolds sale lists seventy drawings by Van Dyck, including one lot of “50 Studies, chiefly for Pictures he painted in England.” Sale, Poggi, London, 26 May 1794 and following days, p. 50, portfolio nos. I and II.

³ Comparable drawings, which are securely documented as preparatory studies for portraits, include: Endymion Porter and His Son Philip, c. 1632; James Stuart, 4th Duke of Lennox, c. 1633; Countess Ernestine of Nassau–Siegen and Her Son and its verso, Quentijn Simons, 1634. See Vey, vol. 1, cat. 200, pp. 271–72; cat. 210, pp. 282–84; and cat. 214, pp. 287–88; repr. vol. 2, figs. 235, 247, 248, and 269.

⁴ In the catalogue of the sale Fine Old Master Drawings (Sotheby’s, London, 25 November 1971, lot 9), the drawing is entitled Study for a Figure of Paris but is not explicitly associated with the Wallace Collection picture (Fig. 1). The consignor of the drawing was “a gentleman.” The Richardson mount had been removed before Vermeer Associates acquired the study in 1991.

⁵ Anthony van Dyck, Paris (Fig. 1). Oil on canvas. 96 × 84 cm. London, Wallace Collection, P85. Jo Hedley, Van Dyck at the Wallace Collection (London: The Wallace Collection, 1999), pp. 78–105.

⁶ Hedley, pp. 82, 88, 96, and 100–101. However, what Hedley sees as “the suggestion of a Phrygian hat” (p. 96) in the drawing was not visible to me on examination of the original.

⁷ Ibid., pp. 82–88.

⁸ Anthony van Dyck, Henry Percy, Baron Percy of Alnwick (Fig. 2). Oil on canvas. 134.6 × 108 cm. Petworth House, Sussex, the Egremont Collection (the National Trust), National Trust 486241. Susan J. Barnes, Nora de Poorter, Oliver Millar, and Horst Vey, Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings (New Haven, Connecticut and London, 2004), cat. IV.188, p. 575, where the portrait is dated circa 1638.

⁹ See note 3 above.

¹⁰ Giovanni Pietro Bellori, Le vite de’ pittori, scultori et architetti moderni, Rome 1672, p. 261. Translation by Tom Henry in Christopher Brown, The Drawings of Anthony van Dyck (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library; Fort Worth, TX: Kimbell Art Museum, 1991), p. 21.

¹¹ On Digby and Van Dyck, see Christopher Brown, Van Dyck, (Oxford, 1982), pp. 144–50, and Oliver Millar in Barnes et al., cats. IV.94–IV.99, pp. 503–10. The lost painting of John the Baptist and the other religious pictures that Van Dyck painted for Digby are cited by Millar under cat. IV.99, pp. 420 and 510, and by Christopher Brown in Karen Hearns et al., Van Dyck and Britain (London: Tate Britain, 2009), under cat. 75, p. 150.

¹² My thanks to Christopher Brown for his comments on my dating of the drawing and speculation that it might be related to the picture of John the Baptist painted for Digby.