In 17th-century drawings you learned to skillfully portray a ‘poop’ or a stork

Drawings were the capital of the seventeenth-century painter. Elaborate, sometimes colored pages could be sold to collectors. But above all an artist built up a reservoir of impressions, figures, motifs or landscapes by making drawings. They were kept in the studio to be used sooner or later in painted compositions. And drawings, of course, also served to learn and practice.

Modern collections of drawings often reflect those different functions. This certainly applies to the collection of Dutch and Flemish drawings that the American couple Sheldon and Leena Peck donated in 2016 to the Ackland Art Museum in the American state of North Carolina. The Rembrandt House shows a fine selection of more than seventy sheets, including works by Jacob van Ruisdael and Jan van Goyen and four by Rembrandt.

Thematic sections illustrate the variety of types and genres. The landscapes include depictions of individual trees, but also detailed studied faces in recognizable places. Esaias van de Velde drew a hilly river landscape in brown ink, with a shepherd and a crouching little man in the left foreground, in keeping with a long tradition of ‘kakkers’ in Dutch printmaking and drawing. A masterful view of a water feature with two boats, executed by Rembrandt with a reed pen, against the background of trees and buildings on the horizon, which are both blurry and accurate with a brush.

To master human anatomy, painters made nude studies. Such a sheet with a largely naked, upright male model by Rembrandt student Samuel van Hoogstraten leads to speculation about the place where the drawing was made (in the studio in Rembrandt’s house that is now the museum?) and the identity of the posing young man who may have been a classmate (Barent Fabritius?). An original, unexpected scene was captured by Cornelis Saftleven, who took a high vantage point to draw a pair of pigeons on a chimney and, further on, a nest of storks on the roof of a church building.

Jack’s signature

Presented unemphatically, but at least as interesting and described in detail by Robert Fucci in the catalogue, are subjects that thematize the art itself. Jan de Bisschop, for example, drew an ancient warrior on a prancing horse, with striking light-dark effects: the drawing was made after a bronze statuette by the Renaissance sculptor Willem van Tetrode.

Jacques de Gheyn II portrayed his son who was also named Jacques and also became an artist. The boy is thoughtfully looking at his drawing sheet, which is still almost empty. It is tempting to connect the remarks that Constantijn Huygens made about the talented, but ‘lazy and spoiled’ Jacques junior with the fact that he has already signed the blank sheet.

A lively man’s head with a cap with elegant plumes has been placed paradoxically by Jacob Matham on the pedestal of a bust. The draftsman seems to want to disprove the seventeenth-century view that the artist who studies antique sculptures too much has mastered the stiffness of the marble.