JAN ANTOON GAREMIJN | Head and shoulders study of a grimacing man

Acquis à Liège, commerce d'art, 1971

Rennes, 2012, n°32 (notice par Guy Grieten)

Hinged to the mount at the top with Japan paper tabs. Further tabs attached on the other three sides, to facilitate handling. The sheet backed with fine Japan paper. Paper lightly discoloured throughout. Minor abrasions at edges. Chain lines in paper (horizontal) visible throughout, either because chalk did not adhere in those places when drawing was made, or because it has subsequently detached, but overall impression given by chalk, and by drawing as a whole, still good and strong. Sold unframed.
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The estate of the long-lived and highly prolific Bruges artist Jan Antoon Garemijn is recorded as having contained more than four thousand of the artist’s own drawings,¹ fully living up to the motto, ‘Nulla dies sine linea’, coined by Pliny the Ender, and adopted by Garemijn as his watchword.² The largest single holding of drawings by Garemijn is in the Steinmetzkabinet, Bruges, where there are more than two hundred sheets.³  These include a wide range of different types of images, of all sorts of subjects, but a particularly substantial and distinctive group consists of large ‘character heads,’ most of which are very similar to the present sheet in their large format, bold, dashing technique, and use of a toned paper support. 

Early in his career, Garemijn was taken under the wing of the local Bruges painter Matthias de Visch, who introduced him to the art of Italy, and in particular France.  Garemijn slowly but surely built a high reputation in his native city and beyond, and was even commissioned to decorate the audience chamber of the governor of Brussels, in 1760-64.  In 1765, he succeeded De Visch as director of the Bruges Academy of Painting, a post he held for the next decade.  After his death, though, his reputation faded fairly rapidly, and today Garemijn’s name is not well known. 

^1.  A. van den Abeele, ‘De kunstverzameling Jan Garemijn,’ Biekorf, no. 83, 1983, p. 43

^2.  W. Le Loup and L. Van Kerkhoven, ‘Jan Antoon Garemijn. Geen dag zonder lijn,’ Brugge Stedelijke Musea en Museumvrienden, Museum Bulletin, no. 6, 1999, p. 1

^3.  C. van de Velde, Stedelijke Musea Brugge, Steinmetzkabinet, catalogus van de tekeningen, Bruges 1984, pp. 167-197