Jan Lievens

Petrus Franciscus Gisbertus van Schrel (1716-1778),

his sale, Antwerp, Chambre des Arquebusiers & à celle des Arbâletriers, 7 June 1774, section ‘Desseins’, lot 30 ( as A. Van Dyck “Le Buste d’un Homme âgé, fait au crayon et dans un ovale, avec ces mots au bas: JE VIS AVEC LANOY.”);

where acquired by Count Wincenty (Vincent) Potocki (1740-1825), through the intermediary of the Antwerp dealer Van Merle(n) (for 29,- florins);

Possibly by inheritance to Princess Apolonia Helena Massalska (1763-1815),

thence by inheritance through the family of her first husband, Prince Charles-Joseph Antoine de Ligne (1759-1792),

to the Del Marmol family,

thence by descent until,

sale, Namur, Salle des ventes Rops, 25 October 2023, lot 9321 as ("Gravure provenant du château Del Marmol"),

where acquired

The black chalk portrait drawings of Jan Lievens, of which some forty examples survive, are a defining aspect of the artist’s drawn work. Rich in personality and wit, and drawn with immense skill, these sheets serve a particular yet evolving function within his œuvre and also have no direct parallels in the works of any of his Dutch contemporaries. 

Initially, Lievens’s portrait drawings were unquestionably inspired by the Iconography, the remarkable series of half- and three-quarter-length portrait prints representing leading cultural figures, engraved after black chalk drawings by Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641). Though engraved portraits of illustrious personages were hardly a new idea in the 17^th century, Van Dyck took this art form in an original new direction. Many of the drawings that he made for this series, including the celebrated group currently and formerly at Chatsworth¹, are drawn with a dynamism of handling and characterisation that has no obvious precedents among works of this type, and much the same can be said of the widely circulated and highly influential prints that were based on these drawings. Jan Lievens was himself the subject of one such print, based on a lost portrait made when Van Dyck encountered the up-and-coming young Dutchman in The Hague in the winter of 1631–32.²

Following his time working in Van Dyck’s London studio from 1632 to 1635, Lievens settled in Antwerp, where he made several very Van Dyckian portrait drawings, chiefly of the members of the apparently rather unruly circle of artists that he frequented, which included Adriaen Brouwer (1605-1638), Daniël Seghers (1590–1661) and Jan Davidsz. de Heem (1606–1684).³ 

For a decade or so following Lievens’s move to Amsterdam in 1644, he continued to make these black chalk portrait drawings, but the works from this somewhat later period are a little different, both in technical approach and in terms of their sitters. In Amsterdam, fellow artists no longer provided Lievens with his subjects: instead he drew portraits of philosophers, such as René Descartes (1596–1650); literary and theatrical figures, including Joost van den Vondel (1587–1679) and Jan Vos (1610–1667); clerics, such as Caspar Streso (1603–1664); and civic dignitaries, such as Andries de Graeff (1611–1678).⁴ Although the subject of this newly discovered addition to the corpus of Lievens’s black chalk portraits has not so far been conclusively identified, he must have been just such a distinguished figure in Amsterdam life.⁵  Stylistically, although the drawing was considered to be by Van Dyck when it was first recorded in the 18^th century, it is evidently by Lievens, and indeed seems less similar in handling to the artist’s early, Van Dyckian portrait drawings than to those from the period following his return to Amsterdam.

A distinctive aspect of this newly discovered drawing is its oval format, something otherwise unknown among Lievens’s portrait drawings. One might wonder if the sheet were not perhaps cut down from rectangular format, were it not for the traces of what appear to be framing lines in one or two places around the edges, and also the unusual band of paper around the edge of the image, bearing the enigmatic inscription: IL VIS AVEC LANOY. Though not part of the main sheet that bears the portrait image, the inscribed border may well have been present since the drawing was made, not least because the first part of the inscription would appear to be the letters IL, which are, of course, the initials with which Lievens typically signed his portrait drawings. 

What the rest of the inscription means remains, however, unclear: the most likely explanation is that it indicates the drawing is a portrait of a person named ‘Lanoy’ – perhaps a member of the illustrious Lannoy family from Flanders – but in the absence of any more information, this association remains speculative.

What is, however, clear is that this is an excellent, insightful portrait drawing of a distinguished gentleman with an extremely expressive face, at once humorous and acerbic. Equally incontrovertible is the fact that only two significant portrait drawings by Jan Lievens have appeared on the market in the last four decades or so: the fine sheet, recently gifted to the Frick Collection, which Elizabeth and Jean-Maire Eveillard acquired at the 2016 sale of the A. Alfred Taubman Collection⁷, and the important 1652 portrait of Admiral Maerten Harpertsz. Tromp (1598-1653), which emerged in a small sale in Massachusetts in 2020.⁸

¹See, most recently, Dürer to Van Dyck, Drawings from Chatsworth House, exh cat., Edinburgh, National Galleries of Scotland, 2024-25, cats. 10-13

²Engraved by Lucas Vorsterman; see The New Hollstein Dutch & Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700. (Anthony van Dyck, Simon Turner, author), Rotterdam, 1996-, no. 72

³Paris, Fondation Custodia, inv. 1203; London, British Museum, inv. nos. Gg,2,233 and 1895,0915.119: see Jan Lievens: a Dutch Master Rediscovered, exh. cat., Washington, DC, National Gallery of Art, Milwaukee Art Museum, and Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 2008-9, cat. 102 and p. 63, fig. 10  

⁴Respectively: Groningen, Museum voor Stad en Lande, inv. no. 1931-173; The original drawing is not known, only the print, by Lievens himself, that is based on it (Hollstein 21); Frankfurt am Main, Städel Museum, inv. no. 836; Paris, Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, inv. no. 3461; Haarlem, Teylers Museum, portfolio P6; see Jan Lievens: a Dutch Master Rediscovered, exh. cat. op. cit., cats. 112, 85, 118, 113, 117

⁵Leonore van Sloten has suggested that the sitter might be the Leiden University scholar Daniel Heinsius, whose lost portrait Lievens drew in 1639, but the facial similarities do not seem conclusive; see Jan Lievens: a Dutch Master Rediscovered, exh. cat. op. cit., cat. 79

⁶Sale, New York, Sotheby’s, 27 January 2016, lot 25

⁷Sale, Marion Antique Auctions, Marion, Massachusetts, 10 October 2020, lot 389; see G. Rubinstein, ‘Commemorating a Hero: Jan Lievens’s Rediscovered Portrait Drawing of Admiral Tromp,’ in Master Drawings, vol. LX, no. 1, Spring 2022, pp. 58-62