Jacob Jordaens

Chevalier de Damery (L.2862);
Amsterdam, Christie's, 21 November 1989, lot 25;
London, Sotheby's, 5 July 2006, lot 104

Hinge mounted. The paper has very slightly yellowed and there is a small light brown stain to the upper right corner. The sheet has fractionally buckled in the upper right corner most probably due to the way in which it is currently hinged. The medium itself is fresh and vibrant throughout.
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The old, bearded man seen in this drawing appears, sometimes with his glasses and sometimes without, and with beards of varying lengths, in several compositions by Jordaens.  He is generally believed to be the artist's teacher and father-in-law, Adam van Noort.  No figure in a known painting corresponds precisely with the present drawing, but the central figure in the famous canvas, The King Drinks, in Brussels, is very similar in facial type, as is that in As the Old Sing, so Pipe the Young (Paris, Louvre); these two paintings were both executed around, or shortly before, 1640 (see Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), Tableaux et tapisseries, exh. cat., Antwerp, Koninklijke Museum voor Schone Kunsten, 1993, cat. nos. A56 and A61).

Another red and black chalk portrait study of Adam van Noort, depicted singing, and seen from the other side, was sold, London, Sotheby's, 2 July 1997, lot 73.  That drawing was used as the basis for the main figure in another, similar painting, As the Old Sing, so the Young Twitter, of 1658 (formerly Berlin, destroyed 1945).  Two other drawings by Jordaens of his father-in-law, executed around the same time as the present study, are in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, and in the Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris (see R.-A. d'Hulst, Jordaens Drawings, 4 vols., London/New York 1974, vol. I, pp. 224-6, cat. nos. A134, A135, reproduced vol. III, figs. 147-8).