RKD STUDIES

It was in his drawings, much more so than in his paintings, that Samuel van Hoogstraten revealed his devotion to narrative art, and much as he had studied it under Rembrandt. We see this especially in the pictorial sheets he made in the 1640s, lavishly worked up with tonal washes, depicting mostly biblical themes, sometimes following works by Rembrandt he saw being made in the atelier. These are accomplished works however, and not assignments under Rembrandt. They begin when his phase of instruction had ended. It is evident that they served as a start to his independent practice as a history painter in Rembrandt’s mold. They substituted for finished paintings, of which he made very few during these years. He even carefully prepared the compositions of these finished drawings with study sketches, much as for a painting. These sketches show a strongly Rembrandtesque manner, functioning more as drawings than as paintings.

It is possible that a contradiction got in the way. In his treatise he places painting above drawing for its capacity to render the visible world, complete with colour. In the end, biblical and mythological paintings did not align with this aim, as the artist had to draw largely on the imagination, and could not study the subject matter in ‘The Visible World’ in front of his eyes. Perhaps he felt more comfortable reserving the medium of drawing for such themes. He was intensely aware of how drawings could conjure imagined reality, in a non-literal way, and praised the merits of the sketchy drawing, apprehended like one would recognize a friend from a distance.¹ Like Rembrandt, he experimented freely with technique, seeking to make contours function spatially, and rhetorically, giving compositions pulsating boldness, with a dominant and massive presence, aspects that relate to his paintings, that were possibly based on Rembrandt’s late painting manner and his open brush work.

He may also have been playing a long game in his artistic quest for universality. He did not abandon the challenge of his master Rembrandt in history painting, but does seem to have recognized it as daunting. He continued to make numerous narrative compositional drawings in addition to studies from life of the figure, animals, architecture, landscape, and people in everyday situations, until his trip to England in 1662. Finally around 1670, financially independent and free, he began to realize his latent ambition of regularly making history paintings, and all but stopped drawing.