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Hendrick van Beaumont:
Learning to draw outside the studio
University of Groningen / Faculty of Arts / Research Master Arts & Cultural Studies
Research Master Thesis
Henrike Scholten / S3279561 24 April 2020
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University of Groningen Faculty of Arts
Research Master Arts & Cultural Studies
Research Master Thesis
Henrike Scholten
S3279561
Supervision: prof. dr. Ann-Sophie Lehmann Second reader: dr. Joost Keizer
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Abstract
Two sketchbooks from the Rijksprentenkabinet, both signed with the name Hendrick van Beaumont and the date 1696, have never been studied. The drawings appear to have been executed by a non-professional draughtsman, likely a young person learning how to draw. They are almost all copies after well-known prints. Through an analysis of the drawings this thesis explores the development of skill within the didactic setting they were produced in, the phenomenon of drawing after prints in Dutch society, and the interconnectedness between drawing education, non-professional practices, and visual culture in the Seventeenth Century Netherlands.
Keywords
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Table of contents
Abstract ... 3 Keywords ... 3 Preface ... 6 0 Introduction ... 80.1 Laocoon and the coppersmiths ... 8
0.2 Research questions ... 19
0.3 Methodology ... 20
0.4 Terminology ... 23
0.5 Literature review ... 25
1 Chapter one: the lineage, the sketchbooks and the prints ... 33
1.1 Who was Hendrick van Beaumont? ... 33
1.2 The sketchbooks: material properties ... 40
1.2.1 Signing, annotations and handwriting ... 44
1.3 Imagining a collection ... 48
1.3.1 Matching, dating, and value ... 48
1.3.2 The prints ... 50
1.4 Six illustrated books, and some absent ones ... 57
1.5 Conclusions ... 61
2 Chapter two: drawings and development ... 62
2.1 Presentation and progress ... 62
2.2 The first sketchbook ... 64
2.3 The second sketchbook ... 71
2.3.1 Excursion: a loose sheet ... 82
2.4 Conclusions ... 83
3 Chapter three: Learning to draw outside the studio ... 84
3.1 Three families ... 84
3.2 The Huygens family ... 86
3.3 Catharina Backer ... 89
3.4 The Ter Borch family ... 94
3.5 Conclusions ... 103
4 Conclusion: the first step ... 104
Bibliography ... 108
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Primary sources ... 109 Secondary sources ... 110
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Preface
This project would not be the same without the conversations I have had with artists, art historians, archivists, teachers, friends and relatives – in living rooms, in the studio, in offices, in the print room, in the RKD lunch room, on the train between The Hague and Leiden, on the phone, by e-mail, over coffee and over various symposium sandwiches. In particular, I thank Nadia Baadj, for kickstarting my digital collecting habit and indirectly leading me to the subject of this thesis. I thank Ann-Sophie Lehmann for her trust and her insightful and encouraging supervision, and Joost Keizer for sharing my enthusiasm for drawing. I thank Yvonne Bleyerveld for sharing her expertise, and Joyce Zelen for her observant comments. Many thanks for the Amsterdam Museum for generously sharing high-resolution images with me, and to Mieke Rijkers from Stadsarchief Breda for her help. Thanks, Vanessa, for being a sounding board for all things to do with art and education. Many thanks to Ellen for proofreading parts and for sharing in the joys and frustrations of this research master programme. Thanks to Esther, Graham, Suzette, Marijke, various employees of the Rijksmuseum, and others for your encouragements and insights. Many thanks to my family for their support, and finally to Leonard, for always being prepared to lend your eyes, and especially for the many discussions we have had about learning to draw.
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0 Introduction
0.1 Laocoon and the coppersmiths
A charming Dutch drawing from 1696 depicts the Laocoon group (fig. 1). It is executed in red chalk on paper, and measures 32 by 21 centimetres. The story, and the marble statue representing one specific moment from it, are well-known even today: the priest Laocoon and his sons are being attacked by serpents.1 The sea monsters, sent by the gods as a punishment for Laocoon’s warning against the
Trojan horse, have already ensnared the boys.2 The father tries to fight them off, with one arm
extended high in the air and pulling up one loop of the serpent’s coils, and the other arm holding another coil down. The priest’s contorted body leads the viewer’s attention upwards to a face that would become known for its restrained and dignified expression of human suffering.3 At least, that is
what Laocoon’s face should be doing. From this drawing it is difficult to tell what expression the face is making. The mouth could be closed or open. The eyes look upwards, one positioned higher than the other. A large triangular snub nose flattens Laocoon’s face. On closer inspection the sons, too, have imperfectly drawn faces. One has a similar triangular nose, but on a face shown in profile. The other’s face looks more convincing, but his features are slightly too small, and too far forward on the head. The priest’s hair and beard, by contrast, are drawn-in neatly with tight, curved lines. Like the faces, the bodies are also rendered awkwardly, but it is a different kind of pictorial awkwardness. The taut muscles that give the priest’s right leg its structure in the sculpture appear in the drawing as a few haphazardly placed shadows; the leg almost appears to be made of chewing gum. One of the serpents wreathing around the figures is coiled around the priest’s ankle. On closer inspection Laocoon is missing a foot below this ankle. The other leg, bent in a sharp angle and also constricted by the serpent, makes a strange, backward curve. By contrast, the torso appears quite accurate. The whole sculpture group is placed on a pedestal which is drawn with slightly wavering lines. The name LAOCOON is inscribed on the bottom part of the pedestal, also in red chalk and in large and somewhat uneven cursive lettering – ended with a full stop. This is Laocoon.
But why is he depicted in this way?
1 Lifschitz, Avi and Squire, Michael (eds). ‘Introduction’ in: Rethinking Lessings Laocoon: Antiquity, Enlightenment,
and the ‘Limits’ of Painting and Poetry. Oxford UK: Oxford University Press, 2017. 10
2 See, for an early modern Dutch translation of Virgil’s verson: Virgil, and Vondel, Joost van den (trans.). Publius
Virgilius Maroos Wercken vertaelt in Nederduitsch door J.v.Vondel… Amsterdam, 1660. 172-173
3 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. Gedancken über die Nachahmung der Griechischen Werke in der Mahlerey und
Bildhauer-Kunst. Dresden and Leipzig: Walther, 1754; Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, Laokoon, oder: Über die Grenzen der Mahlerey und Poesie, Berlin: C.F.Voss, 1766.
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The antique statue itself, which is still located in the Vatican, was rediscovered near Rome in early 1506. The story goes that as soon as pope Julius II heard about the find of some beautiful antique statues, he sent the architect Giuliano da Sangallo to their finding place. Da Sangallo went there with an entourage that included Michelangelo, his house guest.4 They identified the statue group that was
emerging from under the soil as the fabled Laocoon. According to Francesco da Sangallo, who as an eleven-year-old accompanied his father on this trip and much later recounted it in a letter, as soon as the statue was unearthed everyone present promptly started drawing.5 Perhaps they wanted to record
the moment. The Laocoon’s reputation was at the time firmly established in humanist circles, but the sculpture group itself was thought to be lost. Pliny the Elder’s praise of the group in the Natural History as “a work to be preferred to all that the arts of painting and sculpture have produced” was broadly understood to mean that Pliny considered it the ideal work of art.6 Although fragments of the antique
world often enough emerged from underground, the fact that a work of such an exalted reputation was rediscovered at this point in the renaissance was an extraordinary occurrence. Quickly following its rediscovery drawings, engravings, casts, copies and models after the group appeared, causing a wide spread of its image. An early engraving of it by Marco Dente of Ravenna, dated between 1515 and 1517 shows an imaginative interpretation of the group, the priest depicted with arms spread wide, and with the serpents not only ensnaring the figures, but also appearing in the background, emerging from the sea - while a slightly later engraving by Dente, likely dating between 1522 and 1525, follows the marble original quite closely.7 It depicts the statue group accurately, in the incomplete the state it
was found in: Laocoon’s right arm and that of one son missing, the fingers of another also absent.8
Later, after the statue was ‘restored’ according to the tastes of the time, its reproductions usually showed the Laocoon with a raised arm, and the two sons with their limbs and fingers newly intact. The red chalk drawing shows a partially restored version. The Laocoon group became one of the most reproduced and most recognizable images of the early modern era.9 Like the sculpture group itself,
the many prints after it were also examples to be followed by aspiring artists.
4 Barkan, Leonard. Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture. New
Haven: Yale University Press 1999. 2-3; Richter, Simon. Laocoon’s Body and the Aesthetics of Pain. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1990. 9-14
5 Francesco da Sangallo, quoted in Berkan, 3.
6 Pliny the Elder, Natural History, 36.37; quoted in Berkan, 5; Bernard Andreae has argued in 1988 that this was
a misinterpretation of Pliny’s Latin text. See: Andreae, Bernard. Laokoon und die Gründung Roms. Mainz: Von Zwabern, 1988. 146-147, cited in Richter, 13.
7 See: Cree, Sarah. “Translating Stone into Paper: Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Prints after Antique
Sculpture” in: Zorach, Rebecca and Rodini, Elizabeth (eds.). Paper Museums. The Reproductive Print in Europe,
1500-1800. Chicago: David and Aflred Smart Museum of Art, 2005. 75-77, fig. 67 and 68.
8 Bieber, Margarethe. Laocoon. The Influence of the Group since its Rediscovery. New York: Colombia University
Press, 1942. 5
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Was this drawing produced in the Vatican, after the sculpture group? Probably not: our drawing from 1696 was drawn after a print. Copying from a three-dimensional source would have posed a different challenge to the person drawing it, and would have resulted in a different, less flat-looking image – likely with different errors. The drawing’s composition can be matched to several early modern prints of the Laocoon. Moreover, the drawing was evidently not done by a professional artist. There is no indication of much anatomical knowledge, nor of a firm grasp of the rules of perspective. The faces are inaccurate. Learning to draw, as it was taught from Renaissance onwards in the artist’s studio and later in the art academy, entailed a long process which in its most basic form consisted of three steps. This process began with drawing after two-dimensional sources such as drawings and prints, then continued with drawing after three-dimensional plaster casts, before the pupil was finally ready to draw from the living model.10 Learning to draw meant mastering a vocabulary of idealized body parts
and classical poses, with the aid of visual materials like prints and casts, supplemented with lessons in perspective drawing and human anatomy.11 The aim was not only to imitate, but to surpass nature.12
The drawing may be an example of a work that was produced by someone learning to draw by copying after prints. It was made in 1696 - almost two hundred years after the statue’s rediscovery - in the Dutch city of Breda. The Vatican statue’s fame had long filtered down to the northern Netherlands. The Dutch publisher and writer Willem Goeree (1635-1711), author of several instruction books on drawing and painting, wrote in 1670 “… Laocoön, en sijne Soonen, een beelt van soodanige vastigheid dat Michiel Angelo daer van dickwils seyde dat het inde Weerelt was overghebleven tot verwonderingh der aenschouwers, om het vermoghen der oude Constenaers, te stellen tot een Exemplaer om na te volgen.”13 This ancient Greek statue, Goeree says with Michelangelo, had survived in the world to
amaze onlookers – and to set an example for artists. It exemplified the greatness of the antique sculptors. Goeree recommended drawing after the prints of it that had recently appeared in Jan de Bisschop’s example book Signorum Veterum Icones from 1668-69. The two Laocoon prints in the book depict the statue from different angles, but not the angle in the red chalk drawing.14 An anonymous
Dutch print in the Rijksmuseum (fig. 2) bears a closer resemblance. In this print the angle is very similar to the drawing. The distorted faces in the drawing become more forgivable when compared to this
10 Goldstein, Carl. Teaching Art. Academies and Schools from Vasari to Albers. Cambridge UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1996.; Nanobashvili, Nino. Das ABC des Zeichnens. Die Ausbildung von Künstlern und
Dilettanti. Petersberg: Michael Imhof Verlag, 2018. 6-12
11 See: Meder, Joseph. Die Handzeichnung. Ihre Technik und Entwicklung. Vienna: Kunstverlag Anton Scholl &
Co. 1919. 207-250
12 Goldstein 119
13 Goeree, Wilhelmus. Inleydingh tot de Praktijck der algemeene Schilder-konst. Middelburg: Wilhelmus
Goeree, 1670. 72
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print, which features similar distortions. This print, which is itself an interesting example of an early colour engraving technique, is probably not an exact match either: the pedestal is missing and one boy’s fingers are not intact in the drawing, while they are in the print. 15 A print by Cornelis van Dalen
after François Perrier from around 1650, in a book that claims to contain pictures of the hundred most famous statues in Rome, matches the drawing closely in its angle, completeness, and inclusion of a pedestal (fig. 3). The long Latin inscription on the printed pedestal, which informs us about its description by Pliny and its location in the Vatican, is condensed in the drawing to only the word Laocoon. But although the match is plausible, there is no way to know for certain whether the drawing copies this specific print. Printed images of the same things circulated in many forms, and there is only so much we can infer about a print on the basis of a drawing done after it.
Figure 2 Anonymous (connected to Johan Teyler). Laocoon. Colour print. 1688-1698 Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. RP-P-1939-896
15 This early colour print is a result of a process invented by Johannes Teyler (1648-ca.1709), and was likely
produced under his supervision. See: Lemmens, G. Th. M and van Beers, J.A. Johannes Teyler. Nederlandse
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Figure 3 Cornelis van Dalen (I) after Francois Perrier. Laocoon in Eigentlyke afbeeldinge van hondert der aldervermaerdste statuen... Amsterdam: Nicolaes Visscher, ca. 1650.
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Our red chalk drawing is not alone. It is sheet 63 recto of a sketchbook of 91 pages. There are two sketchbooks by their author; the other has 30 pages. Both are located in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where they are kept in storage. There they are part of the Rijksprentenkabinet, the largest national collection of prints and drawings in the Netherlands. The drawings in the albums are signed in a few places with the name Hendrick van Beaumont, and annotated with the year 1696 and the city-name Breda. Only the recto pages of the two books are filled with images, mostly one drawing per page, and occasionally two, individually demarcated. Most of the drawings are executed with a similar, charming clumsiness. The images show a variety of scenes and subjects and are copied after many different two-dimensional sources, mainly engravings and etchings. The Laocoon appears towards the end of the second book. Two pages before this Laocoon, Hendrick has copied a print depicting two coppersmiths at work (fig. 4, 465-61), after a Jan Georg van Vliet etching from around 1635. One coppersmith is drawn hunched over a tub, perhaps beating it into shape with a hammer. The coppersmith’s colleague is cutting a copper plate to size with a large clipping instrument. Hendrick has attempted to copy all main visual elements faithfully, but the many ovals on that print - copper pans and tubs, wooden baskets, lanterns, candle holders and a large jug - pose a challenge to the draughtsman (fig.5). A more practiced hand might have displayed more ease in handling the curves of those objects, might have handled the faces differently, and would probably would have taken the chiaroscuro effect of the etching into account. The copy is not perfect. But the 125 drawings in the two books evidence a continued process of copying after prints. Each example poses a new visual challenge to the draughtsman, and in every copied drawing these challenges and Hendrick’s improvised solutions to them can be glimpsed. In other words, they show a learning process. As we shall see, this is not a steady and linear road towards mastery, but a process with twists and turns - apparent good days and bad days. In this process different types of imagery serve as reference material: in the sketchbooks the mythological classicism of the Laocoon lives alongside the more down-to-earth figures of Dutch genre prints.
The sketchbooks contain drawings after prints of famous sculptures, genre images, amusing folk characters, allegories of the senses, emblems, various mythological scenes, playful putti, many landscapes, a handful of saints and several drawings portraying or glorifying stadhouder-king Willem III (1650-1702). The 125 drawings in the books are executed either in chalks (red chalk being the most often used), or in pen or brush with watercolours or black ink. In most drawings a similar hand can be recognized, but parts of some drawings - and some entire drawings - look like they could be executed by another person. The hair on Laocoon’s head, which does not entirely match with the rest of the drawing, is an example – and possibly also Laocoon’s torso. The coppersmiths have no such difference in their execution. The drawings have all been individually catalogued by the Rijksmuseum, and can be
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accessed through their online collection platform, Rijksstudio. In this online catalogue many of Van Beaumont’s drawings have been matched to existing works by the likes of Hendrick Goltzius, Willem Isaacz. van Swanenburg, Abraham de Blois, Solomon Savery and Adriaen van Ostade; I have attempted to further match the other drawings to existing prints (see Appendix I). A handful of the drawings have explanatory captions underneath (“Pallas” or “Tactus”), or short verses. When their creator must have been particularly proud of his work, it is annotated with a name and date, for instance with: “H. v. Beaumont fecit. Breda, 1696, den 29 November.”; informing the viewer that H. van Beaumont made the drawing on the 29th of November, 1696, in Breda. (See Appendix I: 465-5)
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Figure 5 Jan Georg van Vliet. Coppersmith. 1635. Rijksmuseum Amsterdam. RP-P-OB-103.712
Before their digitalisation the drawings seem to have escaped the attention of curators and scholars. Moreover, it is not known how and when the albums entered the Rijksprentenkabinet. The Rijksmuseum’s digital collection, Rijksstudio, states that they were first indexed in 1995.16 In a list of
names in the 1964 guide to the Rijksprentenkabinet, the name H. van Beaumont also appears, sorted under eighteenth century draughtsmen of the northern Netherlands.17 The 117 sheets with their 125
16Anonymous. “Schetsboek met 91 bladen” Rijksstudio [online resource]. Accessed 3-1-2020, accessible via
http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.312566; Anonymous. “Schetsboek met 30 bladen” Rijksstudio [online resource]. Accessed 3-1-2020, Accessible via http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.312557
17 Hoop Scheffer, D de. Gids voor het Rijksprentenkabinet: Een overzicht van de verzamelingen met naamlijsten
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drawings can instinctively be understood as the work of a non-professional: they are unimaginative, imperfect copies after existing prints. This might explain why they have never been the subject of a published study. Understanding the two albums is complicated by the fact that it is not known who this Hendrick van Beaumont was. The surname is certainly not unknown in the Netherlands: Simon van Beaumont (1574-1654) was a notable lawyer, diplomat and poet; his son Herbert van Beaumont (1607-1779) was a well-connected statesman.18 Another Simon (1641-1726), a son of Herbert, was a
statesman and diplomat whose contributions to botany were praised by Linnaeus.19 The genealogical
and archival sources concerning persons with the name Hendrick van Beaumont in the late seventeenth century I have found are few in number and leave much to guess. There were only a handful of people alive with this name, none of whom left relevant clues in the sense of authored publications, letters, legal records, et cetera. The name does not appear in sources of artists’ biographies, such as Arnold Houbraken’s De groote Schouburgh of 1718, or Jacob Campo Weyerman’s Levens-beschryvingen of 1729. By all indications, nobody with the name seems to have chosen the profession of painter or printer in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century.20 The only Hendrick
van Beaumont registered in Breda at the time was a great-grandson of Simon van Beaumont, the poet. This Hendrick was born in 1687, making him eight or nine years old in the year 1696. If this is the Hendrick van Beaumont of the albums, the drawings are cast in an interesting light. While the drawings look fairly clumsy for adult work, especially if we compare them to the drawings by professional artists that have survived the ages, for a nine-year-old they would be exceptionally skilful. But even if their creator was not a precociously gifted nine-year-old child, the possibility that the drawings were made by a preadolescent or adolescent person is nonetheless real. To my modern eyes, the drawings largely look like they were made by a young teenager (although, as we shall see, there are also elements in them that point to even different skill levels). But it is actually possible to determine a historical draughtsman’s age based on visual evidence? How can we know? It is this riddle that makes the drawings so interesting to me. As a contemporary artist I am a draughtsperson (and occasional teacher)
18 Blok, P.J. and Molhuysen, P.C (eds.). Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek. Part one. Leiden: A.W.
Sijthoff’s Uitgeversmaatschappij, 1911. 262-265
19 Blok and Molhuysen, 265-266
20 See: Houbraken, Arnold. De Groote Schouburgh der Nederlantse Konstschilders en Schilderessen. Vol 1-3.
Amsterdam: Arnold Houbraken, 1718, 1719, 1721; Weyerman, Jacob Campo. De levens-beschryvingen der
Nederlandsche konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen, met een uytbreyding over de schilder-konst der ouden.
The Hague: Bouquet, Scheurleer, Bouquet and de Jongh, 1729.
The name Hendrick van Beaumont appears in an alphabetical list of printers, publishers and booksellers which was compiled in 1876. He is listed as having been active in Amsterdam from 1642. However, no books published or sold under that name are known to me. Because information in this book was partially ‘crowd-sourced’, some portions may be inaccurate; I suspect that whoever sent in the name might have confused it with that of printer Willem van Beaumont, active in Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century. See: Ledeboer, Adrien Marie. Alfabetische Lijst der Boekdrukkers, Boekverkopers en Uitgevers in Noord-Nederland. Utrecht: J.L. Beijers, 1876. 11
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by trade, and I understand drawing as a multifaceted practice: there is more than one way to learn, more than one way for something to be good or interesting. But how is the way we now understand drawing, and the development of skill in drawing, different from the seventeenth century? To approach these questions, we must not only look at historical methods of learning how to draw, but also at the role drawing played in society at large in the early modern period. Drawing ability varies greatly among people, and like other skills it depends on training, aptitude and experience, and the time and social environment someone grows up in. Persons who grew up in artistic circles, for instance the children of painters, would often draw from a young age; pupils training in an artist’s studio received their instruction while they also carried out all kinds of manual work for the painter. But in the genteel classes of early modern European society, young people often enough received training in drawing even when they had no intention of becoming professionals. It was a valued skill which along with singing, dancing, playing musical instruments, fencing, and horseback riding was considered an important part of the education of young men.21 Young women who were privileged enough to receive
a humanistic upbringing were similarly taught drawing.22 A well-known Dutch account of a highly
privileged childhood that almost self-evidently included drawing lessons can be found in the autobiography of Constantijn Huygens the Elder (1596-1687); he notes that the skill of drawing is “necessary in many cases, and useful everywhere.”23 Drawing was a useful tool for visual
communication. Its uses in different esteemed professions, not least in the military, were praised in the early modern rhetoric surrounding drawing education.24 As we shall see, there are many reasons
to assume Hendrick van Beaumont was not training to be a professional. Hendrick’s drawing exercises after prints could have been a part of a didactic programme that was supervised by a parent or tutor – but what kind of programme was it, and how was it implemented? But although the sources and my own instincts point to a fairly young person, it is also possible that the drawings reflect the efforts of an older dilettante teaching himself how to draw (or simply keeping entertained). And even if the draughtsman was not as proficient as a professionally trained artist, he was evidently dedicated enough to fill at least 117 sheets with copies after prints.
So, who could Hendrick van Beaumont have been, and what can the two books teach us about drawing, pedagogy and non-professional drawing practices in the Dutch Republic? In this thesis I examine the
21 Jorink, Erik, Lehmann, Ann-Sophie and Ramakers, Bart. “Introduction“ in: Lessons in Art: Art, Education, and
Modes of Instruction since 1500. Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 68. Brill: Leiden 2019. 7-8
22 Roberts, Benjamin. Through the Keyhole. Dutch child-rearing practices in the 17th and 18th century. Three
urban elite families. Hilversum: Verloren, 1998. 117-121
23 Huygens, Constantijn I. (ed, and trans. Kan, A.H.). De jeugd van Constantijn Huygens, door hemzelf
beschreven. Rotterdam and Antwerpen: Donker. 1946. 65-66. Translation by the author.
24 See: Remond, Jaya. ‘Draw everything that exists in the world. ’t Light der teken- en schilderkonst and the
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two sketchbooks and the sustained practice of copying after prints that their pages evidence. I think the drawings are worth studying precisely because they are not perfect. Apparently divorced from professional artistic practices and production, they reflect the possibilities, priorities and struggles of those learning to draw outside the studio. They tell us something about how the visual culture of the early modern Netherlands, which saw a flourishing printing industry and with it an unprecedented spread of visual images, functioned inside the domestic and pedagogical spaces where people were consumers (rather than inventors) of those images.
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0.2 Research questions
The aim of this study is to examine Hendrick van Beaumont’s drawings for the first time, in order to identify the draughtsman and to reconstruct the context they could have been produced in. What can be inferred about the drawings from their material and visual characteristics? What do the prints and books Hendrick van Beaumont copied from tell us about the aim of the drawings and the social milieu he was part of? And how does the choice of imagery reflect drawing teaching methods of the time? In what ways do the drawings indicate the development of skill and the implementation of a didactic process? How did the elite and the higher burgerij view the artistic education of children, and how did these views translate into practice? How do the drawings compare to the works of other seventeenth century drawings by non-professionals in the Dutch republic? The answers to these questions will help pinpoint Hendrick van Beaumont as a historical figure.
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0.3 Methodology
In order to reconstruct the didactic and cultural context in which the drawings were made, I first analyse the drawings as primary sources in connection to the printed images they are derived from. Matching the drawings to their prints not only increases our knowledge about the drawings and allows for comparison between the ‘original’ and the drawing after it, it also points to the contents of a personal or family collection of prints and books that no longer exists. It allows a glimpse of the visual material objects that accumulated in Hendrick van Beaumont’s environment, and shows how prints functioned not only as collectible objects but as visual aids in learning how to draw. In the first chapter under section 1.3.1. I further explain the implications and limits of connecting drawings to prints. An overview of the drawings and the prints they derive from can be found in Appendix I. Also in the Appendix is a list of illustrated books that Hendrick likely have had access to, as reconstructed from these matches. Examining relevant primary sources in conjecture with secondary literature puts my findings and interpretations in perspective and helps to contextualise Hendrick’s drawing production. Because no-one works in isolation, I compare Hendrick’s drawings with the drawn output of other Dutch children and dilettantes of the period by whom drawings have survived, in the third chapter. Doing so, I try to pinpoint the place these drawings occupied within the educational process, and whether the young age indicated by the genealogical data is plausible in light of these comparable drawings.
In the second chapter I analyse the material properties of the sketchbooks and drawn images in the sketchbooks. This analysis relies largely on connoisseurship: an analytical tool that historically was geared towards attribution and identification of artworks. Its roots go back to antiquity and the renaissance (when it was already important to know a good artwork from a bad one or a copy), and the practice relies on trained discernment, “mostly but not exclusively visual.”25 The 69th issue of the
Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek of 2020 is dedicated to connoisseurship and the knowledge of art. Its introductory essay points towards a present revival of a method that was mistrusted for much of the nineteenth and twentieth century. The knowledge of the connoisseur was seen as subjective, elitist and authoritarian, and its status as a scientific discipline was contested at best, since it is difficult to quantify. According to the authors of the NKJ connoisseurship evolved and reinvented itself as “an interdisciplinary practice that enhanced traditional methods of close looking and archival documentary research with science, by employing both a scientific method and technologies borrowed from
25 Perry Chapman, H., & Weststeijn, T. ‘Connoisseurship as knowledge. An introduction.’ Netherlands Yearbook
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scientific disciplines.”26 In other words, the advancement of new techniques for the analysis of
materials and the collaboration with scientists has remade connoisseurship and strengthened its epistemic claims. It is now more broadly understood as a form of visual and material knowledge. Further, connoisseurship has a kinship with detective work, one that has been made explicit by Carlo Ginzburg in his influential 1980 article on Freud, Morelli and Sherlock Holmes. He reconstructed how beginning in the late nineteenth century the psychoanalyst, the art historian and the fictional detective focused their respective modes of analysis on easily overlooked, ‘unconscious’ bits of evidence to uncover the facts they needed - and argued for its revaluing in the humanities of his own time.27 My
own research process has more in common with the kind of connoisseurship Ginzburg describes than with the more technical kinds, but it is nonetheless helped by modern technology. Earlier, acquiring “experience-based sensory material knowledge and visual memory” required access to a great number of artworks inside collections.28 As Judith Noorman has noted, the recent and ongoing digitalisation of
museum collections has made the study of drawings accessible to a much wider public.29 Much of my
own knowledge of early modern prints and drawings was acquired in these digitalised collections, where high resolution images of countless historical artworks are freely available. Joseph Meder in Die Handzeichnung, the authoritative handbook on drawing from 1919, implies that knowing how to draw is an important skill for the connoisseur: “Dazu kommt der allgemein empfundene Mangel eigener zeichnerischer Übung und Fertigkeit, der immer eine Unsicherheit im richtigen Sehen, ein hilfloses Herumtappen und Anlehnen zur Folge haben kann.”30 In Meder’s view, a lack of practice and skill leads
to an insecure and incorrect way of seeing. As a draughtsperson I am equipped to make judgments and analyse Hendrick’s way of drawing; even if my training was modern and included only some elements of the ‘academic’ model, it has imparted skills of close looking as well as an embodied and procedural understanding of drawing.
In practice I look for three types of clues. First, iconographical and compositional elements and other visual aspects in the drawings, such as annotations, were used in tracking down the prints Henrick used as a reference. Secondly: recurring drawn elements, such as the shapes of hands or the leaves on trees (the type of visual elements often thought to be unique to individual artists) were used to determine
26 Ibid, 15
27 See: Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Method.” History Workshop 9
(1980): 5–36.
28 Perry Chapman and Weststeijn, 8
29 Noorman, Judith. ‘Drawn into the light. The State of Research in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Drawings.’ In
Frantis, Wayne (ed.). The Ashgate Research Companion to Dutch Art of the Seventeenth Century. New York: Routlegde, 2017. Pp. 323-357
22
which parts of the drawings are by Hendrick’s own hand and which may not be.31 Thirdly, by looking
closely at traces of underdrawings and other material aspects Hendrick’s way of drawing, and thereby his way of learning, can be partially reconstructed.
Although I look at stylistic elements, I do so with some caution because I think the way Hendrick draws is still too underdeveloped to be called a personal style. Using Richard Wollheim’s characteristics of an individual style, Hendrick van Beaumont’s drawings would be classified ‘pre-stylistic’ works.32 To cite
Wollheim: “Specifically style puts within reach of a painter the fulfilment of his intentions. An artist can fulfil his intentions: the painter who is not an artist can merely make work that is suggestive of, or evidential for, his intentions.”33 Presumably Hendrick is not yet at a point where putting chalk or a
brush to paper produces the exact result he aimed for. All in all, I analyse a process of acquiring skill rather than style – even if Hendrick has a drawing hand that is sometimes quite recognizable, and I also sometimes distinguish between different ‘hands’ in the books. Additionally, Hendrick’s development as a draughtsman is shaped by the materials he had at his disposal, and how he thought or was taught to use them.The visual aspects of each of Hendrick’s drawings are shaped by the visual information found in the reference picture, the working materials, the way he was instructed, as well as the efforts, solutions and shortcuts Hendrick makes to render his pictures on paper.
31 In 1604 Karel van Mander mentions in ’t Schilderboeck hoe the ‘gheest’ of an individual painter can be seen
in their rendering of draperies, leaves, air and hair. In the late nineteenth century, Giovanni Morelli used a similar observation as a starting point for his method. See: Van Mander, Karel. Het Schilder-Boeck…. Haarlem: Paschier van Wesbusch, 1604. Folio 37r-v; Ginzburg. 24
32 Wollheim,42 33 Ibid, 43
23
0.4 Terminology
If this thesis were written in Dutch, it would be about a tekenaar. The word can indicate someone who draws professionally, as well as someone who draws for amusement: tekenaar simply means someone who draws. Nowadays the word drawer is not widely used in the English language for a person who draws; I use it here occasionally. The English term draughtsman (or draughtsperson) connotes someone who draws professionally or technically, the word comes from draughting, but in practice it can be used for anyone who has made a drawing.34 I will use it as such. The Rijksmuseum’s catalogue
defines all the images in Hendrick’s albums as drawings. David Rosand, in Drawing Acts, defines drawing in its most basic form as mark-making. A drawing is characterized by the presence of lines on a surface. It is different from painting in the sense that it leaves the supporting surface, such as a paper, visible.35 For this thesis I define a drawing as a non-printed work on paper, made with dry or wet media.
While the main material used by Hendrick van Beaumont is chalk, a number of images are executed in either pen and black ink, or brush and watercolour; the latter are also classified as drawings and not as paintings. The white of the paper plays a role in their execution. Willem Goeree in the Inleydingh tot de algemeene Teycken-konst of 1670 also classifies works done with a brush on paper as drawings. “Oock teyckentmen met de Pinceel datmen wassen noemt, en dat doet men met Sappen en Inckten…”; when one draws with the brush it is called washing, and it is done with saps and inks.36
Calling the two books Hendrick worked in sketchbooks also invites some clarification, since the drawings contained in it are arguably not sketches: they are not done quickly, nor are they made with the purpose of setting up a larger composition. They are all studies and copies. But since the term drawing book already refers to printed books of drawing examples, calling Hendrick van Beaumont’s two books drawing books would be confusing inside that discourse.37 For the purposes of this thesis
they are sketchbooks.
Lastly, I avoid the word amateur because in the seventeenth century in Holland, the word and its Dutch translation liefhebber did not yet mean someone who dabbles in an art or craft; the word denoted an art-lover. By the late seventeenth century, artists and writers on art distinguished the art-buying public between liefhebbers – those who claimed to love art but did not know much about it – and kenners,
34 "draughtsman, n.". OED Online. December 2019. Oxford University Press. Accessible via:
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/57524?redirectedFrom=draughtsman, accessed January 2, 2020.
35 Rosand, David. Drawing Acts. Studies in Graphic Expression and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002. 1-2
36 Goeree, Wilhelmus. Inleydinge tot de algemeene Teycken-konst. Middelburg: Wilhelmus Goeree, 1670. 78
37 Bolten, Jaap and Dietz, Alexander (trans.). Method and Practice : Dutch and Flemish Drawing Books
24
connoisseurs with a more discerning taste, and more knowledge about art.38 I use the word dilettante
to indicate someone who draws or practices art for other reasons than for money. As we shall see, these motivations include but are not limited to drawing for its own sake (the delight at the root of the word dilettante).39
38 Taylor, Paul. “The Birth of the Amateur” Nuncius 31, 2016. 499-522; Perry Chapman and Weststeijn, 26-27 39 "dilettante, n.". OED Online. March 2020. Oxford University Press. Accessible via:
https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/52779?isAdvanced=false&result=1&rskey=Vzvj39& , accessed January 18, 2020.
25
0.5 Literature review
While the oeuvre of Hendrick van Beaumont so far has never been the subject of any published literature, scholarly or otherwise, my research is positioned in an expanding scholarly field within the discipline of art history; recent scholarship connects early modern drawing pedagogy with the practices of professional artists and dilettantes, as well as examining notions of copying and artistic practices outside the studio.40 Because of the nature of the drawings under examination, this thesis
incorporates themes from the history of Dutch drawing, artistic education, copying, dilettantism, print culture, as well as the history of childrearing and childhood in the Dutch Republic.
The study of Dutch seventeenth century drawings has long been something of a niche specialty. Judith Noorman’s essay in the 2016 Ashgate Research Companion to the Dutch Seventeenth Century describes how drawings have long been under-studied, because of the limited public accessibility of the fragile and light-sensitive medium. “Moreover, the research is typically object-based, monographic in approach, and connoisseurial in nature. This has barely changed since the nineteenth century.”41
Monographs of drawn oeuvres have largely been dedicated to the more famous names such as the perennially popular Rembrandt, and draughtsmen like Jan Asselijn and Roeland Savery, particularly in the 1970’s and 1980’s.42 Studies into individual non-professional draughtspeople and their oeuvres are
still relatively uncommon in the field of art history in the Netherlands. There are some examples in early modern collections of artists’ biographies of people who did not paint or draw “om den brode.”43
Additionally, many drawings and other creative works by dilettante hands have survived in private and public collections; they intermittently receive scholarly attention, especially in journals dedicated to works on paper.44 In 1996, Baukje J. L. Coenen completed a dissertation on the work of Leendert van
der Cooghen (1632-1681), an amateur draughtsman active in Haarlem. A revised version of this
40 See: Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 68, 2019; Word & Image 35:3, 2019; Nuncius 31, no.3, 2016;
Nanobashvili 2018, Heilmann, Maria, Nanobashvili, Nino, Pfisterer, Ulrich, and Teutenberg, Tobias (eds.). Lernt
Zeichnen! Techniken zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft. 1525-1925. Passau: Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 2015;
Stighelen, Kathlijne van der. “Anna Francisca de Bruyns (1604/5–1656), Artist, Wife and Mother: a
Contextual Approach to Her Forgotten Artistic Career” in: Moran, Sarah Joan and Pipkin, Amanda (eds.) Women
and Gender in the Early Modern Low Countries. Leiden: Brill, 2019.
41 Noorman 321 42 Noorman 324-325
43 See, for instance, Houbraken’s biography of Leendert van der Cooghen: Houbraken vol.1, 350-354, or
Weyerman’s biography of Theodoor Netscher: Weyerman, De levens-beschryvingen der Nederlandsche
konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen, met een uytbreyding over de schilder-konst der ouden. vol. 4. Dordrecht: Ab
Blussé en Zn., 1769. 140-148
44 See, for instance: Bleyerveld, Yvonne and Veldman, Ilja. “Hoogtepunten uit Museum Catharijneconvent:
26
dissertation was published in the Master Drawings in 2005.45 Van der Cooghen never needed to
support himself financially with artistic work, and although he had received some formal artistic training in the form of an apprenticeship and was well-connected in artistic circles, he produced drawings and etchings mostly for his own amusement. But other cases are less clear cut: the lines between early modern professional and non-professional art production were occasionally thin. Johannes Teyler (1648-ca.1709), for example, was by training a professor of philosophy and mathematics, but was also an active draughtsman. The small study on his life that appeared in 1961 states that he was part of the Bentveughels in Rome (the Dutch artists’ society) at one point in his life, and later supervised an innovative printing studio in Holland – more as an inventor of a printing technique than one of original images.46 Further, of the various known Dutch dilettante artists from
the seventeenth century, lawyer and collector Jan de Bisschop (1628-1671) is an especially interesting figure because he did more than just make drawings and etchings: he also facilitated two books with examples after famous artworks, conceived especially for aspiring draughtspersons to copy from.47
Bisschop and his drawing books were the subject of a study published in 1985, written by Jan Gerrit van Gelder and Ingrid Jost. Allison McNeil Kettering’s complete catalogue of the drawings produced and preserved by the Ter Borch Family, published in 1988, is another early example of a study of non-professional draughtsmanship; the unusually good state the drawings are preserved in, and their proximity to Gerard ter Borch Jr. (1617-1681), who grew up in this household, perhaps also explains why they were worthy of scholarly attention already in the 1980’s. Gerard ter Borch the Elder subjected his sons (and possibly his daughter) to what seems like an unusually intensive educational programme. The results of his approach, in the form of hundreds of drawings by his children, offer valuable insight into both the methods of early modern drawing pedagogy and into what children are capable of when they are intensely trained in drawing from a young age.
The basic tenets of a professional education in drawing have been fairly consistent from the Renaissance until well into the nineteenth century. Learning to draw entailed copying the works of great artists, from the antique and from one’s ‘own’ time, in order to acquire a vocabulary of idealized forms and eventually the skill to produce one’s own compositions. In its most basic form this method consists of three steps: the aforementioned method of drawing first after two-dimensional sources such as prints (beginning with loose body parts and then progressing to more complex images), then
45 Coenen, Baukje J.L.. "The Drawings of the Haarlem Amateur Leendert Van Der Cooghen." Master Drawings
43, no. 1 (2005):, 5-90
46 Lemmens and van Beers, 9-16
47 Gelder, Jan Gerrit Van, Jost Ingrid, and Andrews, Keith (ed.). Jan De Bisschop and His Icones & Paradigmata :
Classical Antiquities and Italian Drawings for Artistic Instruction in Seventeenth Century Holland. Doornspijk:
27
after three-dimensional sources such as plaster casts, before one was finally ready to draw after the living model. In his long authoritative handbook titled Die Handzeichnung, Ihre Technik und Entwicklung of 1919, Joseph Meder dedicated a chapter to the different steps involved in learning to draw by copying.48 According to a 1988 exhibition catalogue for Creative Copies : Interpretative
Drawings from Michelangelo to Picasso, Meder’s book then still offered the best (if brief) study of drawings after other works of art.49 In the 1981 exhibition catalogue from the Rijksprentenkabinet,
titled Figuurstudies, Dutch figurative drawings are examined in light of their drawing processes.50 In
2006 Marijn Schapelhouman, published a Rijksmuseum Dossiers volume on drawing education in Rembrandt’s workshop, an education that included copying exercises.51 The process of early modern
copying after prints has itself not been the subject of much scholarly interest, possibly because it is not as advanced or as highly regarded as making one’s own compositions. In the 2000 Rubenshuis exhibition catalogue Beelden van de Dood: Rubens kopieert Holbein, a series of early drawings by Peter Paul Rubens after a print series by Hans Holbein is central. The drawings were made when Rubens was twelve or thirteen years old, and the essays in the catalogue further elaborate on the place of copying in the development of young artists.52 A 1984 exhibition catalogue titled Children of Mercury: The
Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries examines the history of art education broadly, including essays on drawing books and handbooks, and one on children’s drawings.53 In 1990
Arthur Efland published A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Currents in the Teaching of the Visual Arts, which ambitiously traces art education from the classical era to the late 1980’s.54 Efland
also treats the development of drawing instruction aimed at young children, although he does not treat the period before the nineteenth century (when public, standardized schooling for children became the norm in many nations) in depth. An intricate examination of learning to draw the human figure in Italian art were examined in Paul van den Akker’s 1991 dissertation titled Sporen van Vaardigheid (Traces of Skill).55 Carl Goldstein’s 1996 book Teaching Art: Academies and Schools from
48 Meder, 251-275
49 Haverkamp-Begemann, Egbert and Logan, Carolyn. Creative Copies. Interpretative Drawings from
Michelangelo to Picasso. New York: Sotheby’s Publications, 1988. 22
50 Schatborn, Peter. Figuurstudies : Nederlandse Tekeningen Uit De 17de Eeuw. 's-Gravenhage:
Staatsuitgeverij, 1981
51 Schapelhouman, Marijn. Rembrandt En De Kunst Van Het Tekenen. Rijksmuseum-Dossiers. Zwolle: Waanders,
2006.
52 Kwakkelstein, Michael in: Belkin, Kristin Lohse, Carl Depauw (eds.). Beelden Van De Dood : Rubens Kopieert
Holbein. Gent: Snoeck-Ducaju en Zoon, 2000.. 35-62
53 Brown University. Department of Art (Providence). Children of Mercury : The Education of Artists in the
Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Providence, R.I.: Dept. of Art, Brown University, 1984
54 Efland, Arthur D. A History of Art Education: Intellectual and Social Current in the Teaching of the
Visual Arts. New York: Teachers College Press, 1990.
55 Akker, Paul van den. Sporen Van Vaardigheid : De Ontwerpmethode Voor De Figuurhouding in De Italiaanse
28
Vasari to Albers traces the rise of specialized art academies, focusing mainly on the Italian, French and British context. Importantly, he examines the so-called ‘academic doctrine’ as it became institutionalized in their educational programmes; a useful term for the step-by-step method that aimed at training the student to surpass nature. The earlier mentioned Creative Copies catalogue addresses the role of copying in various early modern artistic practices; a 2005 catalogue from the David and Alfred Smart Museum in Chicago, titled Paper Museums, reflects on the complex and often underappreciated phenomenon of the reproductive print between 1500 and 1800.56 A recent edition
of the Word & Image journal is dedicated to early modern practices and conceptions of copying in both an artistic and a scientific context.57
Not reserved for professional artists, drawing was a popular early modern skill and was long thought to be an important component of the education of gentlemen. A study into the phenomenon already appeared in 1979, with Wolfgang Kemp’s „...einen wahrhaft bildenden Zeichenunterricht überall einzuführen”: Zeichnen und Zeichenunterricht der Laien, 1500-1870 : Ein Handbuch. The phenomenon has also been examined by Kim Sloan in ‘A Noble Art' : Amateur Artists and Drawing Masters C. 1600-1800, and by Ann Bermingham in Learning to Draw : Studies in the Cultural History of a Polite and Useful Art, both published in 2000 and both mainly concerned with amateur drawing in Britain. More recently in 2010, Alexander Rosenbaum has treated the topic of amateur artistic practices among the eighteenth-century European nobility. Nino Nanobashvili’s recent book titled Das ABC des Zeichnens. Die Ausbildung von Künstlern und Dilettanti, addresses methods of drawing education for professional artists and laypeople alike.58 The 68th issue of the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek, titled Lessons
in Art: Art, Education and Modes of Instruction since 1500 treats artistic education in the Dutch context. Recent scholarship from the University of Heidelberg as part of the Episteme der Linien-project attests to the growing recognition of the influence exerted by pedagogical methods and examples, not just in the education of professional artists and craftspeople, but also as part of a general education.59
The role of Dutch didactic books in artistic education has been the topic of several studies since the 1970’s. Jaap Bolten’s dissertation titled Method and Practice : Dutch and Flemish Drawing Books 1600-1750, first published in 1979, is a seminal study into “those printed didactic works in the field of the
56 Zorach and Rodini
57 See: Fransen, Sietske & Reinhart, Katherine M. “The practice of copying in making knowledge in Early
Modern Europe: an introduction”, Word & Image, 35:3, 2019. 211-222
58 Nanobashvili 2018
59 See: Teutenberg, Tobias and Ninobashvili, Nino. Drawing Education: Worldwide! Continuities, transfers,
mixtures. Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publishing, 2019; Heilmann, Maria, Nanobashvili, Nino, Pfisterer,
Ulrich, and Teutenberg, Tobias (eds.). Punkt, Punkt, Komma, Strich. Zeichenbücher in Europa. 1525-1925. Passau: Dietmar Klinger Verlag, 2014; Heilmann et al., 2015.
29
pictorial arts, in which the instruction makes use of the visual, rather than the verbal medium.”60 Of
these drawing books Abraham Bloemaert’s Artis Apellae Liber of 1650 was the most elaborate and most successful example in the Low Countries. Its many sheets of disembodied faces and body parts, human figures and a wide array of other visual examples and motifs were reprinted well into the eighteenth century. The verbal medium, by contrast, was employed in seventeenth century art instruction books by Chrispijn van de Passe (II) (1643-44), Samuel van Hoogstraten (1648), Willem Goeree (1668), Gerard de Lairesse (1701), which have all been the subject of academic studies or critical editions in the recent decades.61 For example, Van de Passe’s popular 1643-44 drawing
instruction book titled ‘t Light der teken- en schilderkonst, which has a visual component and a written text in four languages, has been reissued in 1973 with a critical foreword by Jaap Bolten. Recently, some surviving copies of this book were analysed in an article by Jaya Remond in the Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 68.62 The role of didactic texts and drawing books were written for an
audience of both aspiring professionals and laymen but, it seems, mostly used by dilettantes; painter’s studios and art academies provided the opportunity to learn directly from artists, so prospective painters who trained there may have had limited use for the books. Still, instruction books provide insights into notions of drawing, skill and professionalism that were prevalent (or at least written about) in the seventeenth century.
Recently Barbara Wittmann has examined the history of children’s drawings and their interpretation in a book titled Bedeutungsvolle Kritzeleien. Einde Kultur- und Wissensgeschichte der Kinderzeichnung, 1500-1950.63 In it she traces how children’s drawings historically have come to be seen as expressions
of children’s creativity and evaluated as indicators of children’s psychological state and cognitive development.64 This was not yet the case in Hendrick van Beaumont’s time. Children’s drawings have
only been a topic of scholarly attention since the late nineteenth century, when the Italian art historian
60 Bolten, 1985, 11; see also: Fowler, Caroline O. Drawing and the Senses : An Early Modern History. Harvey
Miller Studies in Baroque Art, 6. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016.
61 See: Passe, Crispijn van de, and Jaap Bolten (ed.). 't Light Der Teken En Schilderkonst. [Repr.] ed. Soest:
Davaco, 1973.; Brusati, Celeste. Artifice and Illusion : The Art and Writing of Samuel Van Hoogstraten. Chicago Etc.: University of Chicago Press, 1995; Weststeijn, Thijs, Beverley Jackson, and Lynne Richards. The Visible
World : Samuel Van Hoogstraten's Art Theory and the Legitimation of Painting in the Dutch Golden Age.
Amsterdam Studies in the Dutch Golden Age. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2008; Kwakkelstein, Michael W, and Willem Goeree. Willem Goeree : Inleydinge Tot De Al-Ghemene Teycken-Konst : Een Kritische
Geannoteerde Editie. Leiden: Primavera Pers, 1998.;Vries, Lyckle De. How to Create Beauty : De Lairesse on the
Theory and Practice of Making Art. Leiden: Primavera Pers, 2011
62 Remond, Jaya. ‘Draw everything that exists in the world. ’t Light der teken- en schilderkonst and the shaping
of art education in early modern Europe.’ Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 68, 2019. 287-321
63 Wittmann, Barbara. Bedeutungsvolle Kritzeleien : Eine Kultur- Und Wissensgeschichte Der Kinderzeichnung,
1500-1950. Zürich: Diaphanes, 2018.
64 See also: Milbrath, Constance, McPherson, Gary E. and Osborne, Margaret S. “Artistic Development” in:
Lerner, Richard S., Liben, Lynn S. and Müller, Ulrich (eds). Handbook of Child Psychology and Developmental
30
Corrado Ricci published L’Arte dei Bambini in 1887. Since Ricci’s ‘discovery’ of children’s drawing as something to be interpreted, a new field emerged that incorporated findings from budding disciplines such as anthropology, prehistoric archaeology, evolutionary theory and research on children.65 In the
field of developmental psychology much attention has been paid to the phenomenon of children’s drawings, as well as for some time in the field of art history.66
More broadly, the role of the child in early modern Dutch society is for instance examined in the introductory essays to the 2000 exhibition catalogue Kinderen op hun Mooist: het Kinderportret in de Nederlanden 1500 – 1700.67 A thorough look at the evolution of childrearing in the culture of the
Netherlands was provided in 2006 by historian Jeroen J.H. Dekker in Het verlangen naar opvoeden, and in 2010 by Nelleke Bakker, Jan Noordman and Marjoke Rietveld- van Wingerden in Vijf eeuwen opvoeden in Nederland. Genteel child rearing is the subject of Benjamin Roberts’ 1998 dissertation titled Through the Keyhole. Dutch child-rearing practices in the 17th and 18th century, which examines
three families from the urban elite class, including one in which drawing played a role.68 One of the
children Roberts examines is Catharina Backer (1689-1760), a name that appears frequently in compendia of female artists in the Netherlands. She received a humanist upbringing, and her interest in art and literature was encouraged by her father. Correspondence between them sheds light on a close bond and a social milieu in which drawing was a valued skill. While Catharina was briefly active as a flower painter, the albums of her own early drawings she compiled later offer interesting insights into the way she developed her drawing skill as a teenager. Women rarely established themselves as professional artists, but art and creative practices often played a role in the lives of privileged women, operating outside the guilds and sometimes at the peripheries of the market.69 The complex position
of women within early modern art has been examined by Elisabeth Honig in a 2002 article titled The art of being “Artistic”: Dutch women’s creative practices in the 17th Century: although women generally
did not produce paintings for the market in the same way that their professional male counterparts did, does not mean that they were not in a sense compensated for their efforts. The works of women dilettantes were held in high social esteem, as the many letters and poems of praise addressed to them attest. Further, in court circles and in the world of the humanist high society, apparent leisure activities
65 Wittmann, 87
66 See: Rubin, L. “First Draft Artistry: Childen’s drawings in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” in: Brown
University. Department of Art (Providence). Children of Mercury : The Education of Artists in the Sixteenth and
Seventeenth Centuries. Providence, R.I.: Dept. of Art, Brown University, 1984.; Wittmann and Barber in: Res: Anthropology and Aesthetics 63-64, no. 63-64 (2013): 125-42.
67 Bedaux and Ekkart 2000
68 Roberts, Benjamin. Through the Keyhole. Dutch child-rearing practices in the 17th and 18th century. Three
urban elite families. Hilversum: Verloren, 1998.
69 Honig, Elisabeth Alice. “The art of being “Artistic”: Dutch women’s creative practices in the 17th Century”
31
like drawing and the connoisseurship of art were helpful to one’s social status. The autobiography of Constantijn Huygens the Elder (1596-1678) suggests as much. Constantijn the Elder was a diplomat, composer and poet whose family was positioned in the Republic’s social elite through close connections with the court. He was a proud dilettante draughtsman and wrote about his early drawing lessons in his autobiography.70 His two sons, the famous mathematician and polymath Christiaan
Huygens (1625-1685), and Constantijn II Huygens (1628-1697), secretary to Stadhouder-king Willem III (1650-1702), drew as well; Constantijn II’s travel drawings have been exhibited in the 1980’s.71 An
intermittent subject of scholarly interest since his private diaries and correspondence were published in the late nineteenth century, Constantijn the Younger is an especially rich source of information about the habits and behaviours of his contemporaries.72 The acquisition and appreciation of drawings
plays a role throughout the many years of regular and later daily entries.73
While educational methods in drawing books have been the subject of much recent scholarship, monographic studies into the works of individual Dutch dilletantes are still rare - studies into the works of individual children even rarer. This is unsurprising, since very little of their drawn output has survived. Until recently not much literature specifically centres on the first step of drawing education, the essential but unglamorous practice of drawing after prints. By examining a non-professional draughtsman, my study fits in with the “broader approach” to studying Dutch drawings that is currently gaining momentum. This approach does not only look at so-called master drawings, but also at drawings produced in other contexts, such as a scientific or an educational setting.74 Such studies may
“call into question the perimeters of what a drawing is, and what one may learn from them.”75 In other
words, they remove drawings from an artistic context into the area of social, educational and epistemic practices. Studying these previously overlooked works might enable new insights into private drawing practices and their role in Dutch society.
In the first chapter of this thesis I examine the available genealogical and historical sources to identify the draughtsman named Hendrick van Beaumont. I also examine the material properties of Hendrick’s two sketchbooks, and partially reconstruct the collection of didactic books and prints Hendrick worked from what kinds of knowledge they conveyed. In the second chapter I analyse a selection of the drawings and the didactic process they evidence. I try to determine whether there is a visible
70 See: Huygens, ed. Kan, 64-67
71 See: Heijbroek, J.F. (ed.) Met Huygens op reis. Zuphen: Terra, 1983
72 See: Huygens, Constantijn jr. Journalen van Constantijn Huygens. Part IIV. Kemink & Zoon, Utrecht 1876
-1888
73 See, for instance: Dekker, Rudolf. Observaties van een zeventiende-eeuwse wereldbeschouwer. Constantijn
Huygens Jr. en de uitvinding van het moderne dagboek. Amsterdam: Panchaud, 2013.
74See: Nuncius 31, no. 3 (2016); Word & Image, 35:3 (2019), 211-222,; Heilmann et al 2015 75 Noorman, 332
32
improvement in artistic skill, and what that improvement consists of. The role of the drawing instructor is also examined in light of the visual evidence in the drawings. In the third chapter, Hendrick’s works and didactic process are examined together with the works and learning trajectories of other draughtspersons who learned outside the studio: the Huygens family, the Ter Borch family, and Catharina Backer.
33
1 Chapter one: the lineage, the sketchbooks and the prints
1.1 Who was Hendrick van Beaumont?
The name Hendrick van Beaumont, the year 1696 and the city-name Breda combined point towards a specific historical figure as the maker of the drawings. The combination of first name and surname is rare in the seventeenth century records; I return to the small handful of possible draughtsmen in the next paragraph. Out of that handful, there was only one person with alive in Breda at the time: a Hendrick van Beaumont, member of a prominent military family, baptised in Amsterdam on 1 October 1687 and buried in Breda on 19 July 1706.76 But this Hendrick was barely nine years old on 29
November 1696 - the only full date appearing in the two sketchbooks (see Appendix 1: sheet 465-5).77
This seems an unusually young age to have made the drawings, so identifying the draughtsman and inferring an age must be done with caution; I discuss the dating and chronology of the drawings further on in this chapter. But could this Hendrick van Beaumont, who died before he was nineteen, have been the maker of the books?78 Are there possible alternative Hendricks, who could have lived in Breda in
1696? And if our young Hendrick from Breda filled the books with over a hundred drawings, what does this tell us about the social world he was part of – what kind of family was it that seems to have so actively encouraged and preserved his drawing activities?
Among the various documented branches of the Van Beaumont family the first name Hendrick was uncommon before the eighteenth century. The full name and variations of it only rarely appear in baptismal, marriage and burial registers. The Amsterdam City Archive lists the Roman Catholic baptism of a Francois Beaumont on 22 July 1680, whose father is listed as Hendrick Seigneuret Beaumont and whose mother as Anna Caree.79 One Hendrik Beaumont, possibly the same person, was buried in
Amsterdam’s Karthuizer Cemetery in 1701.80 The prefix van (present in each drawing signed Hendrick
van Beaumont) is missing from the surnames on these documents. A likely still living Henrik van Beaumont appears, without a birth year, in a genealogical list in a 1677 history of the city of Dordrecht; he was an acht (likely an achteman: a local legislative function) in Dordrecht and was married to
76 See: Dek, A.W.E. “Het geslacht Van Beaumont uit Dordrecht”, Ons Voorgeslacht, vol. 29, issue 228, 229, 230,
1974. 1-17, 25-52.; Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, DTB Dopen, Nieuwe Zijds Kapel 1 Feb 1677 – 31 Dec 1687, arch.nr. 5001, inv.nr. DTB 67 (01-10-1687) p.226; Breda, Stadsarchief Breda, Doop- Trouw- en Begraafregisters (DTB), Begraafposten in de rekeningen van de Grote Kerk, 1705-1706, arch.nr. HKV, inv.nr.101 (16-07-1706), fol. 84r
77 See: Appendix I: Sheet 465-5
78 Since genealogical information is based on baptismal and burial records, they do not indicate the actual dates
of births or deaths but those of the baptisms or burial registrations. The difference between Hendrick’s date of baptism and his burial is 18 years, 9 months and 19 days.
79 Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, DTB Dopen, Kerk de Star, arch.nr. 5001, inv.nr. DTB 336 (22-07-1680) p.25
80 Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, DTB Begraven, Karthuizer Kerkhof, 1 Aug 1701 – 31 Dec 1704. arch.nr. 5001, inv.nr.
