CIRCLE OF REMBRANDT HARMENSZ. VAN RIJN (Leiden 1606-1669 Amsterdam)

Mothers and grandmothers with children are the subject of some of the most touching drawings by Rembrandt and his school. The most famous example of such sheets is perhaps Rembrandt’s red chalk drawing showing two women teaching a toddler to walk in the British Museum, London (inv. 1910,0212.187; see Benesch, op. cit., no. 421, fig. 507). In the present sheet, a mother holding her child listens to an elderly woman who seems rather engaged with her story to judge by her gesturing hands. The child’s attention is drawn by a figure whose leg is just visible to the left (the sheet was probably trimmed along the left edge).

Benesch dated this drawing to circa 1636 and compared it stylistically to two drawings showing a mother holding a child (ibid., nos. 342-343, figs. 414 and 416). Martin Royalton-Kisch furthermore compares the elderly woman to the right to one in a drawing in the Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest (ibid., no. 411, fig. 494), but adds that an attribution to Rembrandt is unlikely due to the ‘lack of precision [...], a disarray in the forms and an inconsistency in the lighting’ (Royalton-Kisch, op. cit.). He suggests an alternative attribution to Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680) by comparison with a sheet given to him that shows Hagar at the Well on her way to Sur in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (inv. RP-T-1930-27; W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, New York, 1984, vol. I, no. 89, ill.). He furthermore suggests a date in the late 1630s when Bol was working in Rembrandt’s studio.

We are grateful to Peter Schatborn and Martin Royalton-Kisch for their assistance in cataloguing this drawing.