RKD STUDIES

David de Witt

All drawings by Samuel van Hoogstraten, including attributions and rejections

It has been clear from the beginning that Samuel van Hoogstraten took drawing very seriously. This was already evident from his own writings, in the substantial section of his famous treatise devoted to drawing, but also from a good number of fully signed drawings he left behind, for example those in the famous early collection of Valerius Röver II ( 1686-1739) (to which we return later), making clear to connoisseurs and collectors that he saw this as an important part of his art.¹ Twenty of are known today, and of these eight are even dated, mostly to the years during and right after his tutelage under Rembrandt (1646-1650). They are almost all compositional studies of historical themes, surprisingly for an artist who gained fame primarily for optical illusions in paint. Even in his writings, Van Hoogstraten placed painting above drawing for its capacity to render the visible world.² What role then did drawing serve for Van Hoogstraten, and why was it nonetheless important to him? This study aims to address this and other questions that arise out of a thorough review of all of the drawings that can, with enough certainty, be ascribed to him.

The main evidence lies in a consideration of the entire drawn oeuvre. This must include the drawings given to him with a high degree of certainty, based on comparison to the core group. Over the years, more than two hundred such sheets have been placed under his name. Scholars such as Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Gustav Falck, Arthur Magyer Hind, Otto Benesch, Frits Lugt, Max Dittmar Henckel, Jakob Rosenberg, Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner, added many individual examples to his oeuvre, followed by George Keyes in 1977.³ By then the Stuttgart professor and scholar Werner Sumowski had already been working on a systematic review and study of the entire drawn oeuvre, as part of research into the drawings of the entire circle of Rembrandt’s pupils, friends, and followers, for his series Drawings of the Rembrandt School. Sumowski’s fifth volume of the series (1981) took up 188 drawings in illustrated entries.⁴ He identified and analysed dozens of unsigned sheets linked to this artist. Many of these echoed the compositions and manner of the known drawings, and of these, many engaged Rembrandt’s manner of loose sketching, and development of motifs and compositions in quick studies. Since then, individual sheets have been added to the oeuvre by Martin Royalton-Kisch, Peter Schatborn, Jeroen Giltaij, Jan Blanc, and other scholars of Rembrandt and his school, including the author.⁵ Behind the scenes, Sumowski also continued to work on the artist’s drawings, for an addendum volume to his series that he had been preparing, presenting another twelve attributions, but which remained unpublished on his death in 2015: it is being readied for publication. Recently, in 2018, two doyens of the field, Peter Schatborn and William Robinson, were able to attribute a spectacular compositional drawing, newly resurfaced, now in the Getty Museum.