Jan Harmensz. Muller

With Bob P. Haboldt & Co., New York, Netherlandish and Italianate Old Master Drawings, 1990, cat. no. 32

Window mounted. Somewhat faded. Some thin areas down left side. Paper a little discoloured.
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Along with Hendrik Goltzius, Jan Muller was one of the leading virtuoso draughtsmen and printmakers in early 17th-century Holland. Many of his drawings are executed in a dramatic, rather wild technique, but there are also a small number drawn like the present work, with a very distinctive combination of highly finished, engraving-like passages executed in a refined federkunst technique, alongside which other parts of the composition are indicated only with faint outlines in either pen or chalk  

This seems to have been a working method that Muller employed when making drawings for his various splendid prints after the works of Dutch Mannerist and Rudolfine artists such as Cornelis van Haarlem, Hans von Aachen, Bartholomäus Spranger, and above all the sculptor Adriaen de Vries.  Two other drawings by the artist, very similarly executed to the present work, represent figures that appear, in reverse, as the central figures in prints by Muller after Cornelis van Haarlem and Spranger.¹  This figure, who may represent Venus, does not appear in any known print by Muller, but does resemble fairly closely several sculptural figures by De Vries,² and may therefore relate to a print that was never completed.

In the extreme precision of the handling, the present drawing can also be compared with the large Sleeping Cupid Spied Upon by Psyche, drawn by Muller on vellum in 1607.³

1.  Arion Playing the Lyre, after Cornelis van Haarlem, with Thomas Le Claire Kunsthandel, Hamburg, cat. IX, 1994, no. 6; Psyche Sleeping, after Spranger, sold, New York, Christie's, 11 January 1994, lot 378A.
2.  e.g. the figure of a naiad on the famous Neptune Fountain, see Adriaen de Vries, exh. cat., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, et. al., 1998-2000, pp. 79, 221
3.  E.K.J. Reznicek,''Jan Harmensz. Muller as Draughtsman: Addenda,'  Master Drawings, vol. XVIII,  no. 2 (1980), pp. 124, 132, no. 18, pl. 8