Lot 263
Attributed to Gerard ter Borch II
Zwolle 1617 - 1681 Deventer
Landscape with trees by a stream, a fence and a cottage behind
Pen and brown ink over traces of black chalk, within brown ink framing lines;
bears old attribution in chalk on the mount: Dutch School
140 by 195 mm; 5½ by 7¾ in.
Condition Report
Catalogue note
This intriguing and engaging drawing combines in an unusual and personal but very effective way two rather different approaches to vegetation. In the upper areas, the leaves are schematically and sparely rendered in a manner reminiscent of the drawing styles of Cornelis van Poelenburch and Claes Jansz. Visscher, whereas the foreground vegetation is much more freely - almost wildly - drawn.
The only obvious parallels to this combination of approaches are to be found in the drawings contained in the earlier section of the celebrated landscape sketchbook, which the teenage Gerard ter Borch the Younger filled, between 1631 and 1634, with very similarly conceived drawings of farm buildings in the environs of his native city of Zwolle.1 Like the vast majority of the surviving drawings by Ter Borch and his family, the sketchbook remained together with the studio estate until acquired by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam in 1887.
The sheets in the Rijksmuseum sketchbook, which share almost identical dimensions with the present drawing, are meticulously numbered by the young Gerard, but in two cases he has written, for reasons that remain unclear, two consecutive numbers on the same sheet, raising the possibility that the volume originally contained two further sheets. Indeed, the present drawing has lost the upper corners where the distinctive folio numbers are to be found on the Rijksmuseum drawings, and it is very tempting to speculate that this could actually be an 'escaped' sheet, which originally formed part of Gerard ter Borch's landscape sketchbook, a cornerstone in the early artistic development of this major figure in 17th-century Dutch art.
1. Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv. RP-T-1888-A-1797; see Alison McNeil Kettering, Drawings from the Ter Borch Studio Estate, The Hague, 1988, vol. I, pp. 154-191, cat. GJr 93