An Italian landscape with trees to the right and towns in the background

The son of an Amsterdam merchant and a lawyer by trade, Jan de Bisschop was a very accomplished amateur draughtsman. It appears that he had an artistic apprenticeship with Bartholomeus Breenberg (1598-1657), and was greatly influenced by his style. Although De Bisschop often depicted Dutch landscape in his drawings, a large number of sheets showing landscapes and architecture in Italy reveals the artist’s great interest in that country and its history. J.G. van Gelder suggested that De Bisschop went to Italy around 1655/57 (J.G. van Gelder, ‘Jan de Bisschop’, offprint of Oud Holland, LXXXVI, 1971 [1972], no. 4, pp. 8-9). Peter Schatborn, however, has argued that the artist never did go to Italy; the Italian inscriptions on his drawings often contain errors and he frequently put unrelated monuments together. Furthermore De Bisschop depicted subjects that no longer existed, or had changed, by the time he could have reached Italy. It would therefore seem that the artist made his Italian views after paintings, drawings and prints by other artists and not from life (P. Schatborn, Drawn to Warmth: Seventeenth-Century Dutch Artists in Italy, exhib. cat., Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, 2001, p. 197-9).