Esaias van de Velde

Sale, London, Christie's, 8 July 1975, lot 129;

sale, New York, Sotheby's, 31 January 2024, lot 139

G.S. Keyes, Esaias van den Velde 1587-1630, Doornspijk 1984, p. 255, cat. no. D129, pl. 240

This understated yet serenely beautiful landscape drawing encapsulates Esaias van de Velde's remarkable abilities as a landscape draughtsman. Despite the brevity of his life, he was a great pioneer, whose stylistic innovations were immensely influential. Although his earliest landscape drawings are mostly in pen and ink, and clearly reflect the influence of Goltzius and the Haarlem mannerists, in 1618-20, Esaias made a series of radically immediate and naturalistic black chalk sketches, which George Keyes described as marking 'a watershed in the history of Dutch draughtsmanship.'¹  During the remaining dozen years of his life he expanded his repertoire to include larger scale drawings such as this, in which a subtle black chalk sketch is worked up with extremely refined grey wash. 

Esaias was particularly skilled in making the greatest possible use of the white of his paper within his lighting schemes, and hardly ever resorted to the application of white heightening. When, as here, the drawing remains in an excellent state of preservation, the subtlety of the resultant patterns of light and shade is movingly powerful, somewhat reminiscent of drawings by the first wave of Dutch artists who went to Italy, such as Cornelis Poelenburch, and yet still totally Dutch in vision. The present sheet dates to the penultimate year of Esaias's life, the period when he made around one third of his surviving drawings, and many of his greatest works on paper. 

¹ G.S. Keyes, 'Esaias van de Velde and the chalk sketch,' Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 38, 1987, p. 140