ESAIAS VAN DE VELDE (AMSTERDAM 1587-1630 THE HAGUE)

Drawn in Esaias van de Velde's characteristically refined technique, this drawing is one of the earliest and largest known sheets by the artist. Keyes dates it to circa 1618-19 on the basis of a comparison with an etching of a wooded landscape (op. cit., no. E8) and a picture from 1619 in Besançon (ibid., no. 110). In the foreground of this extensive landscape is a canal with a trekschuit (a horse-drawn boat), and in the far distance one can observe the city of The Hague, where the artist had moved in 1618, with the spire of the Grote Kerk. While ferries are frequent in the artist's paintings (see, for example, The Cattle Ferry, from 1622, now in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, inv. SK-A-1293), depictions of the, at the time, fairly novel trekschuit are rarer. The trekschuit, which was usually drawn by a horse, offered an inexpensive and reliable way of traveling between towns in Holland until it was replaced in the nineteenth century by the railroad. Another drawing by van de Velde showing a trekschuit in the distance is in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (ibid., no. D118, plate 235).