Adriaen van de Velde

Though he is unquestionably known primarily as a painter of landscapes with animals, Adriaen van de Velde had more sides to his artistic personality, and painted a small number of important religious compositions. His drawings in particular show a great variety and originality of technique, encompassing some of the grandest and most brilliant red chalk figure studies in all Dutch art, freely handled wash drawings such as this composition study, serene landscape compositions executed in black chalk and gray wash, and lively studies of cows and sheep, clearly made from life. 

In many of the wash drawings, we find exactly the same broad handling of light and pointy-nosed physiognomy seen here; particularly comparable is the British Museum's study of The Angel Appearing to The Shepherds, in which the face of the startled shepherd to the right echoes very closely that of the equally startled Virgin Mary in the present drawing.¹ As Marijn Schapelhouman described so well in his recent catalogue entry for Adriaen's most famous religious painting, the Rijksmuseum's Annunciation, the artist had a particular gift for capturing the sort of surprise and emotional conflict that the Virgin would surely have been feeling in reaction to the Archangel's sudden appearance.²  

Though the overall disposition of figures in this drawing is similar to the Rijksmuseum painting, it cannot reasonably be considered a preparatory study for it. It is, though, very close in style to various wash drawings that are studies for prints or paintings, such as the pair of studies of the continents, formerly in the Klaver Collection and now in the Amsterdam City Archives.³

1. London, British Museum, inv. no. 1895,0915.1329; see B. Cornelis and M. Schapelhouman, Adriaen van de Velde, Dutch Master of Landscape, exh. cat., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, and Dulwich Picture Gallery, 2016-17, cat. 60, reproduced 

2. Ibid, p. 109

3. Inv. nos. 10097/555 and 10097/556; see Cornelis & Schapelhouman, op. cit., cat. 57-8