Sunday, April 1, 2018

Jacob van der Does and Italian Landscapes (with Sheep)

Jacob van der Does
Italian landscape with shepherd
1660
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Jacob van der Does
Italian landscape with shepherdesses
1672
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

 Jacob van der Does
Italian country house with shepherd
1650
drawing
British Museum

"Jacob van der Does occupies a modest place in the pantheon of artists who painted and drew pastoral scenes.  We know of a few drawings he made in Italy, and Italian subjects occasionally crop up in his later work.  . . .  Van der Does studied first under Nicolaes Moyaert in Amsterdam and then, 'when he was 21 years of age he went to France, and set out on foot for Italy in company with others'.  This must have been in 1644 or 1645.  'He spent several years in Rome industriously drawing and painting, practising after the best examples, notably by Bamboots.'  It must indeed have been Pieter van Laer's painted and etched pastoral scenes that particularly appealed to Van der Does.  In Rome Jacob was nicknamed Tamboer (Drum) by the Bentvueghels.  . . .  Van der Does returned to the Netherlands in or after 1650, and the 'several years' in Rome were over.  All his later drawings – the earliest dating from 1652 – are pastoral scenes with imaginary herdsmen and animals."

Jacob van der Does
Shepherd with flock beside a stream
1652
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Jacob van der Does
Landscape with sheep and two figures
before 1673
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Jacob van der Does
Landscape with stone bridge, shepherd and flock
1652
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jacob van der Does
Italian landscape with shepherd boy
1670
drawing
British Museum

Jacob van der Does
Italian landscape with shepherd, sheep and cow
before 1673
drawing
British Museum

Jacob van der Does
Italian landscape with shepherd and donkey
before 1673
drawing
British Museum

Jacob van der Does
Landscape with sleeping shepherd and flock
before 1673
drawing
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Jacob van der Does
Italian landscape with shepherd, shepherdess and flock
1670
drawing
British Museum

Jacob van der Does
Italian landscape with herdsman
before 1673
drawing
British Museum

Jan van Bronckhorst
Portrait of Jacob van der Does, shortly after his return from Italy
1655
drawing
British Museum

 Jacob van der Does and Martinus Lengele
Double-portrait of Martinus Lengele (left) and Jacob van der Does
ca. 1656-62
drawing
Musée des Beaux-arts, Besançon

"Upon his return home Van der Does settled in The Hague, where he was involved in founding the group of Hague painters known as Pictura in 1656.  One of the other founder members was Martinus Lengele, whose portrait appears in a drawing [directly above] with that of Van der Does, bearing the truncated inscription 'this was drawn by Martin Lengelo, pictor, and Jacob van der Does . . .'   This drawing, in which each man presumably portrayed the other, will have been made in the period after the establishment of the artists' community and in any event before Van der Does left for Amsterdam in the early 1660s.  . . .  Houbraken says that Van der Does was friendly with Karel Dujardin, who also went to live in The Hague in the mid-1650s but moved to Amsterdam in 1659, in other words before Van der Does.  Where art was concerned the friends usually disagreed, 'since Karel favoured the light and he [Van der Does] the brown style of painting', that is to say the shadowy manner.  Houbraken adds that they 'nonetheless always remained good friends'."

– Peter Schatborn, from the catalogue of a 2001 exhibition at the Rijksmuseum, published in English as Drawn to Warmth: 17th-century Dutch artists in Italy, translated by Lynne Richards