Karel van Mander the Elder

Framed in modern reproduction frame. Window mounted in japan paper. Some pale fox marks, and a little surface dirt at the edges of the sheet. There is a small hole to the far right of the lower edge, neatly made up. The ink is slightly sunk in parts, but overall the condition is fine and the drawing makes a very good impression.
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Karel van Mander has a distinguished reputation as a painter, draughtsman, poet and biographer, but perhaps his greatest claim to fame of all is that it was he who was the prime initiator of the distinctive and original Mannerist style that developed in Haarlem during the last decade and a half of the sixteenth century.

During the course of a four-year stay in Italy, between 1573 and 1577, Van Mander met Bartholomeus Spranger, who subsequently invited his fellow Fleming to join him in Vienna, where both artists worked together on the creation of a triumphal arch for the emperor Rudolf II.  After returning to the Netherlands, Van Mander's pro-reformation beliefs caused him to leave his native Flanders and settle in Haarlem, where he lived from 1583 until 1604.  In Haarlem, Van Mander befriended the slightly younger artists Hendrick Goltzius and Cornelis Cornelisz. (Cornelis van Haarlem), and showed them drawings by Spranger that he had brought back from his travels.  Inspired by these works, and feeding off their own close artistic interaction, the three artists rapidly developed a powerful and highly innovative Haarlem Mannerist style, which had a profound and lasting influence on Dutch art.

In many of Van Mander's most characteristic drawings (such as, for example the superb design for a print illustrating a popular proverb, formerly in the Klaver Collection¹), the conception and subject matter are utterly Dutch, but in the present drawing the pose of the figure does hint at the more international, even Italianate, origins of Van Mander's Mannerism.  Though the drawing was executed in 1596, long after Van Mander had returned to the Netherlands, the influence of Spranger in particular remained long in evidence, and this was also the high point of Van Mander's artistic dialogue with Goltzius, who had himself visited Italy in 1590-91.  Additionally, both artists were accomplished and prolific printmakers, and the highly calligraphic yet precisely controlled use of line seen in many of their drawings of the 1590s reflects to some extent the visual effects of their prints.  Characterised by extraordinary power and energy, the drawings of the Haarlem Mannerist triumvirate – Goltzius, Cornelis van Haarlem and Van Mander – include some of the greatest of all Dutch drawings.  The present work, which is previously unrecorded, is one of the most imposing and ambitious drawings by the founding father of the group, Karel van Mander. 

1.  Sold, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 10 May 1994, lot 6