Study of a seated old man

Hardly known as a painter, Van der Cooghen left a small number of prints and a little over sixty drawings, most of them figure studies and portraits. As reported by Arnold Houbraken, he was well-off and did not work for a living, but his œuvre is of high quality, at the level of that of his Haarlem colleague and friend Cornelis Bega, with whom Van der Cooghen is said to have drawn from life. Like another celebrated Haarlem artist, Jan de Braij, Van der Cooghen systematically – and conveniently – dated his drawings between 1651 and 1667. The drawing offered here belongs to a group of studies after the same older model, all relatively early works dated 1653 (Coenen, op. cit., nos. A19-A23, figs. 22, 23, 58-61). The controlled hatching, clean outlines and marked contrasts between light and shadow, all present in the present work, are hallmarks of his style.