Abraham Bloemaert

Sheets of studies such as the present sheet were an integral part of Abraham Bloemaert’s working method. While in some cases the different studies on a sheet – of heads, hands, arms, draperies, legs and so forth - were simply exercises, at other times the artist seems to have been working towards a painting. As Stijn Alsteens has noted of Bloemaert’s study sheets, ‘The dating of these drawings is difficult; it can be assumed that many were made from life, with a model posing. Some studies are preparatory for Bloemaert’s painted compositions or print designs…In most study sheets, however, the artist seems to have had no specific…narrative in mind, and these collages of heads, limbs and drapery should be considered as part of the tradition of model sheets…However, it cannot be excluded that Bloemaert made them to accommodate collectors with a taste for such examples of pure, and superior, draftsmanship.’

This unpublished sheet of studies by Bloemaert contains four studies of an old bearded man of a distinctive type and physiognomy that is found in many of the artist’s religious paintings. Although none of the four heads in this drawing can be identified as exact preparatory studies for specific figures in paintings, very similar heads occur in such works of the 1620s and 1630s. The head at the upper left of the sheet, for example, is close to one in an Adoration of the Shepherds of 1623 in the Sint Jakobskerk in The Hague, while the head at the lower left is similar to that of Saint Joseph in an altarpiece of The Adoration of the Magi of 1623-1624, today in the Musée de Grenoble. Similarly, the centrally placed head in this drawing is akin to that of the saint in an easel painting of Saint Paul at Prayer of 1631, in the collection of the Centraal Museum in Utrecht.   

The red chalk study of a posed female nude on the verso of this sheet is a rarity among Bloemaert’s drawings, as most of the artist’s relatively few studies of female nudes are drawn in pen and ink. Similar female nudes seen from the back occur in a handful of works by Bloemaert, such as a painting of The Judgement of Paris of c.1592 in a private collection and The Flood of c.1590-1595 in the Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, or a circular drawing of Lot and his Daughters of c.1600-1605 in a private collection.

Unlike the vast majority of Bloemaert’s sheets of studies in red chalk, this drawing does not seem to have been part of the large group of around 140 drawings by the artist that were at one time in the collection of the French landscape painter André Giroux (1801-1879), and which were dispersed at auction in Paris in 1904. The ex-Giroux drawings are numbered on the upper right corner of the sheet, up to 162, which suggests that they may have formed part of an album. The present sheet does not bear a number and thus is unlikely to have come from the Giroux album.