Prague School, circa 1600

Purchased by the late father of the present owner in London, circa 1960

This delicate yet substantial sheet of studies of trees is somewhat hard to categorise, but the rough, buff-coloured paper on which it is drawn appears to be Northern European, from the period around 1600. To narrow down further the region in which the drawing was produced, one can reasonably draw parallels in terms of the types of tree depicted and the other slight indications of landscape details with drawings by the various artists from the Netherlands who travelled to Prague at the end of the 16^th century, to work at the remarkable court of the Holy Roman Emperor, Rudolf II (1552-1612).

In their feathery handling, these trees recall in particular some of those that appear in the large and dramatic drawings of rugged Bohemian landscapes made by Roelant Savery (1578-1639), such as the splendid Landscape with Waterfall in the Lugt Collection.¹ In his surviving landscape drawings, Savery seems only to have used red chalk in combination with black chalk and other media, but he did occasionally make figure drawings purely in red chalk², and the combination of delicacy and grandeur that we see here is consistent with the artist's Prague period drawings in all media. Although a firm attribution remains elusive, it none the less seems justified to locate the drawing in the immediate Prague orbit of Savery.

^1.Paris, Fondation Custodia (Frits Lugt Collection), inv. 4783; A. van Suchtelen, Roelant Savery's wondrous world, exh. cat., The Hague, Mauritshuis, 2024, cat. 1

^2.For example Two Beggars and a Woman's Headdress, Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, inv. MB1791, and A Stag, on the verso of a characteristic pen and ink figure study in Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett, inv. KdZ 729v