EGBERT VAN HEEMSKERCK THE ELDER | A QUAKERS' MEETING

Sale, London, Sotheby's, 25 March 1920, lot 74;

sale, London, Phillips, 11 December 1996, lot 80,

where purchased by the late owner

A pupil of Pieter de Grebber, Egbert van Heemskerk settled in London around 1680 where he soon came under the patronage of the Earl of Rochester.

The Quaker Meeting was a subject that the artist treated on several occasions, with paintings on this theme today housed in Powysland Museum, Welshpool,¹ Saltram Park, Devon² and perhaps most notably, Hampton Court Palace.³ Though the portrait format of the present drawing is somewhat at odds with the aforementioned paintings, which are all executed in a landscape format, the staffage and general architectural elements of the Hampton Court Palace painting and our drawing, can be very closely compared.

The composition of The Quaker Meeting is also known through the existence of numerous engravings after the Hampton Court Palace picture, two of which, by Carel Allard and Arthur Tooker, are today in the collection of the British Museum.⁴

^1. Inv. no. 1983.184

^2. Inv. no. 872129

^3. C. White, The Dutch Pictures in the Collection of Her Majesty the Queen, Cambridge and London 1982, pp. 46-47, no. 61, pl. 51, reproduced 

^4. G. Stephens and M. George, Catalogue of Political and Personal Satires in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, London 1870, nos. 155 and 156