Jan Lievens

This previously undescribed sheet, with its energetic handling and highly individual approach to physiognomy, can with some certainty be added to the relatively small group of pen and ink figure drawings by Jan Lievens, the great majority of whose known drawings are of other types. Defining the boundaries and chronology of this section of Lievens’ drawn oeuvre is one of the greatest challenges to be faced when studying the artist’s drawings, as only some five such sheets are either signed or directly connected with other works, and those five span more than four decades, from the very beginning to the very end of Lievens’s life.

The present work is closest in handling to a signed sheet in Düsseldorf¹, with which it shares its very fluid and calligraphic penwork, pointed facial features and very strong, dark accents in the shadows. That drawing is generally believed to date from the period (1635-1644) when Lievens was living and working in Antwerp. At that time, the influence of Van Dyck was particularly evident in his drawing style. Other drawings by Lievens that are handled in a rather similar way are the Half-Length Study of a Woman in Profile, in the Abrams Collection at Harvard University², and the River Gods, recently sold from the Van Regteren Altena Collection.³ Also comparable, and showing more of the intensely hatched shading that is so apparent in the present work, is a Study of an Old Man in Profile, in a private collection.⁴ 

The shading in this newly discovered study is certainly more striking than in many of Lievens’s other figural drawings, as is the way that this shading is combined with expansive, calligraphic lines, so freely handled that previous collectors attributed the drawing to Guercino; but one quality that unifies Lievens’s drawings, particularly these pen studies, is that they show so many subtle differences of handling, one from another, while still maintaining stylistic consistency as a group. Lievens never stopped experimenting as a draughtsman, something that makes his drawings endlessly fascinating, if sometimes challenging to classify.

^1.Düsseldorf, Kunstmuseum, inv. FP 5092; Jan Lievens, a Dutch Master Rediscovered, exh. cat., Washington, Milwaukee & Amsterdam, 2008-9, cat. 120

^2.Maida and George Abrams Collection, Boston; exh. cat., Washington et al., op. cit., cat. 96

^3.Sale, London, Christie’s, 10 July 2014, lot 44; exh. cat., Washington et al., op. cit., cat. 105

^4.Private collection; G. Rubinstein, ‘Three newly identified figure drawings by Jan Lievens’, Liber Amicorum Dorine van Sasse van Ysselt, The Hague 2011, pp. 53-54, fig. 3