Jan Lievens 1607-1674

Alfred Beurdeley, Paris (L.421);
His sale, Paris, Georges Petit, 8 June 1920, lot 224 (Fr.510, to Houthakker);
H.E. ten Cate, Oldenzaal (L.533b);
with C.G. Boerner, Düsseldorf, 1964;
with Gebr. Douwes, Amsterdam, 1965;
Saam and Lily Nijsted, The Hague

Düsseldorf, C.G. Boerner, 150 Meisterzeichnungen des 16. bis 19. Jahrhunderts, 1964, cat. no. 63;
The Hague, Haags Historisch Museum, Grenzeloos Goed, Tekeningen uit de Unicorno Collectie,  3rd March - 27th May 2001, cat. no. 59

H. Schneider, Jan Lievens. Sein Leben und seine Werke, Haarlem 1932, pp. 215-6, cat. no. Z 166;
D. Hannema, Catalogue of the H.E. ten Cate Collection, 2 vols., Rotterdam 1955, vol. 1, p. 143, cat. no. 255, reproduced vol. 2, plate 100;
H. Schneider and R. Ekkart, Jan Lievens. Sein Leben und seine Werke, Amsterdam 1973, pp. 215-6, 366, cat. no. Z 166;
C. White, 'The theory and practice of drawing in early Stuart England,' in Drawing in England from Hilliard to Hogarth, exhibition catalogue, London, British Museum, 1987, p. 25, reproduced;
Kleu en Raffiniement, Tekeningen uit de Unicorno Collectie, Amsterdam, Museum Het rembrandthuis and Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum 1994-5, p. 19, reproduced p.22, fig. 20;
M. Royalton-Kisch, 'The Lugt drawings by Rembrandt and his School,' in The Burlington Magazine, 140, 1998, pp. 620-22, reproduced fig. 35 (as probably by Jan Andrea Lievens) 

The subject of this drawing, first recognised by Christopher White (loc.cit.), is Westminster seen from the south bank of the Thames, with the Abbey to the right of centre surrounded by the buildings of the old Palace of Westminster;  these buildings housed the English Parliament until the dramatic fire of 1834, after which they were replaced by the famous Parliament buildings that remain in use today.  Despite the importance of this location, relatively few views of Westminster from this period survive; amongst the most significant are the topographical background in Van Dyck’s famous 1632 portrait of King Charles I with Queen Henrietta Maria and their children, the so-called ‘Greate peece’ (The Royal Collection), which shows the same view from a position further to the right, and Wenceslaus Hollar’s 1647 etching, taken from further to the left.

The drawing is important not only as a rare early topographical record of London, but also as the most substantial visual document of the three years or so that Jan Lievens spent in the English capital, from 1632 until about 1635.  Having trained and worked in Leiden, alongside Rembrandt, Lievens came to work in the fertile artistic environment of Caroline London, where he made acclaimed portraits of the royal family and members of the court, including one portrait of the King, sadly no longer known, which Van der Doort records as having been exchanged for no lesser work than the Wilton Diptych.  Lievens must also have come into contact at this time with Van Dyck, who included an etched portrait of the Dutchman in the Iconography.  This meeting was of the greatest significance in the subsequent development of Lievens' portrait style - when he left London in 1635 he even settled for some years in Antwerp - but unfortunately hardly any works from this crucial period survive.  Indeed, in addition to the present drawing and a repetition of the central part of the same view, in Hamburg (Kunsthalle, inv. nr. 22122; see The Hague 2001, p.116, fig. 59.1), only two other scraps are known:  a rather slight black chalk sketch in Frankfurt, possibly depicting a Thames view and with an old attribution to Lievens on the verso, but of somewhat uncertain attribution; and a much later engraved view of Whitehall in Thomas Pennant’s Of London (London 1790) which gives Lievens the credit for the original drawing. 

Stylistically, the somewhat painstaking execution of the buildings is not entirely typical of Lievens’ more familiar, mature landscapes, which, together with a degree of topographical license (e.g. the inclusion of a fictitious low hill towards the right of the composition), has led some scholars to suggest that the drawing might in fact be a much later reprisal by the artist’s son, Jan Andrea Lievens, of a lost drawing by the father.  The lively and free execution of the foreground foliage and the highly atmospheric lighting are not, however, paralleled in the few surely attributable drawings by the younger Lievens, and the less characteristic aspects of this drawing can surely be explained by the fact that Lievens made few topographical drawings of this type, and also by the fact that there is no surviving corpus of Lievens drawings of the 1630s with which this can be compared.  On balance, there would appear to be no compelling reason to question the traditional, more straightforward attribution to Jan Lievens, and this drawing is therefore an extremely rare and important record of the artist’s otherwise largely undocumented stay in London.