CIRCLE OF REMBRANDT HARMENSZ. VAN RIJN (LEIDEN 1606-1669 AMSTERDAM)

This drawing, documented in four major collections of the past, was considered an autograph work by Rembrandt from the 1650s, until Otto Benesch recognized it as based on a sheet in the Frits Lugt Collection, now convincingly dated to the early years of the decade (inv. 3564; see Benesch, op. cit., 1973, V, no. 907; and Schatborn, op. cit., I, no. 14, II, ill.). A comparison between the two sheets shows that the Lugt drawing is cut, missing some of the landscape background surrounding the two figures; the anonymous draughtsman also added the two background figures between them, while omitting the still life on the ground next to the seated prophet, which Rembrandt blotted out with white bodycolor in the Lugt version.

The subject is taken from chapter 19 of the first Book of Kings : Elijah, threatened by Jezebel, wife of King Baal, ‘went a day’s journey into the wilderness, and came and sat down under a juniper tree: and he requested for himself that he might die’ (verse 4); but an angel appeared to him and ‘touched him, and said unto him, Arise and eat’ (19:5). The theme was treated, among others, by Ferdinand Bol, by whom a drawing formerly (?) in the Bruck collection in Buenos Aires was directly inspired by Rembrandt's composition (W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, I, New York 1979, no. 268, ill.).