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, with the drawing intended to prepare different parts of a single multifigural composition. 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 sheet of studies is likely to be a relatively late work by the artist. Both the facial type and the distinctive hairstyle of the two studies of the head of a woman in the lower part of the drawing occur in numerous paintings by Bloemaert of the late 1620s and 1630s. The hand drawn in red chalk at the top of the sheet was used for the hand of Adonis holding a spear in one of the artist’s finest works; the large painting of Venus and Adonis of 1632, today in the Statens Museum for Kunst in Copenhagen. 

The present sheet was part of a large group of around 140 studies by Bloemaert - mostly figure studies drawn in red chalk - that were at one time in the collection of the French landscape painter André Giroux (1801-1879), and were dispersed at auction in Paris in 1904. Most of these 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, perhaps one assembled by one of the artist’s sons. Jaap Bolten has suggested that the Giroux drawings were drawn between 1595 and 1630, and were not meant as preparatory studies for paintings but as a sort of model-book or sketchbook of motifs to be copied by Bloemaert’s students. Cecile Tainturier has suggested, however, that the drawings in the Giroux album may be more precisely dated to the decade of the 1620s. Other drawings by Bloemaert from the ex-Giroux group are today in the collections of the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt, the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Frits Lugt Collection (Fondation Custodia) in Paris, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen, and elsewhere.