Carel Fabritius

Charles Rogers (1711-1784), London (L.625),

his sale, London, Philipe, 15 April 1799, lot 533 (as Rembrandt);

William Russell (1800-1884), London (L.2648),

his sale, London, Christie's, 10-12 December 1884, lot 415 (as Rembrandt);

John Postle Heseltine (1843-1929), London (L.1508);

sale, London, Sotheby's, 25 February 1948, lot 89 (as Samuel van Hoogstraten, Christ and the Magdalen);

Carel Emil Duits (1882-1969), Amsterdam and London (L.533a),

by descent until sale, Amsterdam, Sotheby's, 9 November 1999, lot 28 (as Ferdinand Bol);

with Flavia Ormond Fine Arts Ltd., London, 1999,

where acquired by Diane A. Nixon

New York, The Morgan Library & Museum; Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings, 2007, no. 37 (as Ferdinand Bol, entry by Stacey Sell)

W. Sumowski, Drawings of the Rembrandt School, New York 1979, vol. I, pp. 468-9, no. 222^x (as Ferdinand Bol);

M. Royalton-Kisch, The Drawings of Rembrandt. A Revision of Otto Benesch's Catalogue Raisonné, (online; https://rembrandtcatalogue.net/), under no. 500, n.1 (as part of the 'Fabritius Group')

Technically, visually and psychologically, this superb drawing embodies all the qualities that define the finest drawings produced by the artists who studied with Rembrandt, the best of whom not only understood and absorbed the teachings of the master, but also forged their own distinctive artistic path. Deceptively simple in its composition, with just the two central figures of Christ and the Samaritan Woman calmly conversing under the beam of the well’s hoist, surrounded by trees, the contrasts between very broad, sweeping pen strokes that define form through outline and much finer ones to create surfaces, and between wide sweeps of dark brown wash and brilliant areas of unmarked white paper, impart an energy and tension that is totally magnetic. Even Rembrandt himself did not so often achieve in his drawings such a powerful yet harmonious depiction of an intensely moving biblical subject. 

Though previously exhibited and published as the work of Rembrandt’s pupil Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680), more recent developments in our understanding of the drawings of the most talented artists who trained with Rembrandt has resulted in its reattribution to the brilliant, if tragically short-lived Carel Fabritius. Though the circumstances of Fabritius’ untimely death in the Delft gunpowder explosion of 1654 are well known, details of his life are not, and the scope of his artistic output has also been much discussed. Just twelve paintings are today accepted as his work, and until Peter Schatborn first proposed, in 1985, that he was the author of six drawings in the Rijksmuseum¹, his name had never been convincingly linked with any drawings at all. 

That first publication was, though, the beginning of a process that has by now resulted in the attribution of a more significant group of perhaps as many as fifty drawings to Fabritius, of which this is arguably the most impressive, accomplished, and – quite simply – the most beautiful.

When Schatborn published the arguments for his initial attributions to Fabritius at greater length in 2006², adding more drawings to the emerging corpus, he noted that even Otto Benesch, whose fundamental catalogue of Rembrandt’s drawings first appeared as long ago as 1954, had recognised that there existed a stylistically coherent group of drawings, mostly representations of biblical subjects, that shared the same distinctive technical features described above, but Benesch had preferred to retain their attribution to Rembrandt. Subsequently, other scholars, notably Werner Sumowski, transformed our understanding of the drawings of many of Rembrandt’s pupils, but at no point was a good solution found to explain the authorship of this group of drawings, many of which – including the present work – Sumowski listed as Bol.

The ingenious observation that led Schatborn to conclude that this mysterious group of drawings might actually be by Fabritius was the fact that in one of the artist’s final paintings, The Sentry, in Schwerin, there is a very thinly painted monochrome passage depicting a sculptural relief, in which the clearly visible underdrawing appears very similar in style to one of the drawings in question, The Twelve-year-old Jesus in the Temple, in Winterthur.³ Since then, Schatborn’s theory has gained widespread acceptance.⁴

Perhaps the most comparable in style to the Nixon drawing of the others now given to Fabritius are The Baptism by Saint Philip of the Ethiopian Eunuch, in the Louvre⁵, or the Hamburg Hagar and the Angel, the latter of which Sumowski also catalogued as Bol.⁶ These, and also others in Berlin, Paris, Wroclaw and elsewhere⁷, all show the same combination of very broad strokes of the reed pen, sometimes sweeping, sometimes more nervous and jagged, together with highly detailed hatching, in various different directions, drawn with a much finer pen. In many respects, these types of pen stroke are reminiscent of Rembrandt’s drawing style of the 1640s, when Fabritius is believed to have spent some years in his studio, but Rembrandt did not combine these techniques in the same way. Similarly, there are Rembrandt drawings of the same period in which he applies extremely broad, almost flat washes, like those seen here, but again, the way in which the techniques are combined is distinctively different from what we see in Rembrandt, or in any documentary, connected drawings by Bol. 

Just four drawings by or attributed to Carel Fabritius have ever been offered at auction, none of them remotely as ambitious or accomplished as this.

^1.P. Schatborn, Tekeningen van Rembrandt, onbekende leerlingen en navolgers / Drawings by Rembrandt, his Anonymous Pupils and Followers (Catalogus van de Nederlandse tekeningen in het Rijkprentenkabinet, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, IV) The Hague, 1985, pp. 135-145, nos. 61-66

^2.Idem, 'Drawings attributed to Carel Fabritius,' Oud Holland,119, no. 2/3, 2006, pp. 130-138

^3.Winterthur, Oskar Reinhart Collection ‘am Römerholz,’ inv. 1932.2.; O. Benesch, The Drawings of Rembrandt, 2nd edn, enlarged and edited by Eva Benesch, London 1973, no. 500

^4.See Drawings by Rembrandt and his Pupils, Telling the Difference, exh. cat., Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009-10, pp. 135-143

^5.Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. RF 4691; Benesch, op. cit., no. 488

^6.Hamburg, Kunsthalle, inv. 21946, Benesch, op. cit., no. 498; Sumowski, op. cit., no. 258^X (Ferdinand Bol)

^7.For further information, see P. Schatborn, Rembrandt and his Circle, Drawings in the Frits Lugt Collection, Paris 2010, vol. 1, pp. 199-202, under no. 77; see also M. Royalton-Kisch, loc. cit.