17th Century Dutch Old Master Drawing By Pieter Jansz (amsterdam 1602 - 1672 Amsterdam)

17^th Century Dutch Old Master Drawing

Pieter Jansz (Amsterdam 1602 – 1672 Amsterdam)

The Assumption of the Virgin

Black chalk, pen and brown ink, brown ink framing lines, 205 x 273 mm (8.1 x 10.8 inch)

Inscribed with early calculation at the top, in brown ink, possibly by the artist

Provenance
Private collection, The Netherlands

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Pieter Jansz was born in 1602 in Amsterdam as the son of a cooper, who died in the year of his birth.¹ Pieter married Oetje Jacobs in 1633, and lived first in the Wolvestraat and then in a house on the fashionable Herengracht, which he had inherited from his uncle Jacob Jacobs. He was buried in Amsterdam’s Nieuwe Kerk on 8 April 1672. According to the artists’ biographer Arnold van Houbraken, who wrote about Jansz in his Groote schouburgh of 1718–1721, Pieter was a glass-painter and a ‘konstig teekenaar op papier’ (‘an artful draughtsman on paper’), and had been trained in Haarlem by Jan Philipsz van Bouckhorst (c.1588–1631), who also specialised in glass painting. An important group of seventeen windows painted by Jansz survives in the Nederlands Hervormde Kerk in Oudshoorn, near Alphen aan den Rijn, installed between 1666 and 1671.² Eleven designs by Jansz for these windows are preserved in the Rijksprentenkabinet, precisely drawn and coloured, which would have served as ‘vidimus’, presented to the church authorities for approval.

The present well preserved and powerful sheet is an unusual oval drawing by Jansz. The design was first roughly sketched in black chalk, and then eleaborated in swiftly applied pen and brown ink and brown wash. The drawing is divided into four sections by a horizontal and vertical line in black chalk, presumably by Jansz himself, and possibly in order to facilitate transfer to another medium or to a different size. The drawing is likely to be a design for a glass window panel – these were frequently oval in shape, and sometimes set into larger rectangular windows, also in domestic settings. The calculation at the top is possibly in the artist’s own hand, and further illustrates the drawings’s role as a working and purely functional model, rather than for presentation to clients.

Drawings by Jansz rarely come onto the market. Groups of his drawings are preserved in the Rijksprentenkabinet (Amsterdam), the Kunsthalle (Bremen), the Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum (Braunschweig) and the Kupferstichkabinett of the Staatliche Museen (Berlin).

This drawing is entered in the databases of the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) in The Hague as a work by Jansz, under reference number 299104.