Adriaen Hendricksz. Verboom

Purchased from Mendelsohn, March 1919

Fixed down left hand side to old album sheet. Light foxing throughout.
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This is one of a group of some twenty broadly similar landscape drawings sharing a certain insistent nervousness of penmanship, which have variously been attributed to the printmakers Claes van Beresteyn and Johannes Brosterhuysen, to Cornelis Hendricksz. Vroom, and lastly to Adriaen Hendricksz. Verboom, the attribution favoured by the greatest number of modern scholars, and one that is now supported by the emergence of this important, signed example.  As Frits Lugt was the first to remark, though, these drawings are not in fact stylistically homogeneous, and are probably not all by the same hand.¹  Cataloguing a drawing in the Louvre, Lugt pointed out the similarities with another in Berlin² that is either signed by Verboom or bears an early attribution to him, and the signature on the present drawing is in the same form, with the letters AVB combined into a monogram.  In contrast, many of Verboom’s drawings in his presumably later, more tranquil style, such as one in the Lugt Collection³, are consistently, and differently, signed ‘avboom’, without capitals or monogram.  All the same, the signature on the Oppé drawing seems to be in the same ink as much of the rest of the drawing, and should therefore be considered genuine.

As a signed work by Verboom, this previously unpublished drawing takes on a rather important role in helping to clarify the thorny problem of the attribution of all the drawings in the group.  Following Lugt’s lead, Jaap Bolten, Carlos van Hasselt, Jeroen Giltay, Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann and Anne-Marie Logan all attributed the majority of the drawings to Verboom⁴, but A.M. Hind, Horst Gerson and most recently Stefaan Hautekeete continued to favour an attribution to Beresteyn.⁵  The latter artist was indeed almost certainly responsible for the drawing, formerly in the Van Regteren Altena Collection and now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York⁶, but the less spikey, more delicate penwork of the Oppé drawing, and also, of course, the signature, indicate that it, on the other hand, is by Verboom.

Verboom’s rare etchings are very similar in style to this drawing⁷, and all his works in this nervous manner must date from early in his career, probably around 1650.  At this point, the artist seems to have spent some time in Haarlem, where he would have come into contact with that city’s great landscape tradition and the works of its earlier leading lights, such as Cornelis Vroom.  Verboom’s early drawings of this type are extremely rare, and only one other example, until recently in the Van Regteren Altena Collection, has appeared on the market in the past generation.⁸

^1.  F. Lugt, Musée du Louvre, Inventaire Général des dessins des écoles du nord, école hollandaise, vol. II, Paris 1931, p.55, under Cornelis Vroom

^2.  Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. 6708; E. Bock and J. Rosenberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Die niederländischen Meister, Frankfurt 1931, vol. I, p. 302, vol. II, pl. 209.  The Berlin drawing is also coloured, but the watercolour in both sheets is probably a later addition.

^3.  Fondation Custodia, Paris, inv. 130; C. van Hasselt, Dessins de Paysagistes Hollandais du XVII Siècle, exh. cat., Brussels et al., 1969, no. 161, pl. 128

^4.  For summary see E. Haverkamp-Begemann and Anne-Marie S. Logan, European Drawings and Watercolors in the Yale University Art Gallery, 2 vols., New Haven/London 1970, vol. I, pp. 237-9, and sale catalogue, London, Christie’s, 10 July 2014, lot 69

^5.  H. Gerson, Leven en Werken van Claes v. Beresteyn, Bijlage II der Genealogie van het geslacht Van Beresteyn, 's-Gravenhage 1940; S. Hautekeete, Tekeningen uit Nederlands Gouden eeuw in de verzameling van Jean de Grez, exh. cat., Brussels/Aachen, 2007-8, pp. 119-122, under no. 37

^6.  Inv. 2001.511; sold, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 8 November 2000, lot 45

^7.  Irene de Groot, Landscape Etchings by Dutch masters of the seventeenth century, London 1979, cat. 224-225

^8.  Sold, London, Christie’s, 10 July 2014, lot 69