Professor Egbert Haverkamp-Begemann has seen the original and has kindly confirmed the attribution. He compares the drawing to another view by Cuyp of the abbey, seen from another angle, generally dated around 1640 in the Dordrechts Museum. He compares the present drawing in style with views of Scheveningen at Dordrecht and Rotterdam, J.M. de Groot, J.G. van Gelder, Aelbert Cuyp en zijn familie, schilders te Dordrecht, Dordrecht, 1977, nos. 52 and 57, illustrated. Several of Cuyp's landscape drawings are comparable in size (De Groot, van Gelder, op.cit., nos. 43, 49, 50) including the dune landscape with the ruins of a castle beyond in the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam (op.cit., no. 530).

The present lot is a preliminary study for the artist's picture of the ruins of the abbey of Rijnsburg in the Collection of the Duke of Sutherland (C. Hofstede de Groot, A Catalogue Raisonné of the Works of the Most Eminent Dutch Painters of the Seventeenth Century, London, 1909, II, no. 170, where erroneously described as the ruins of Koningsveld near Delft). Cuyp's picture of the same ruins seen from the south-east is in the Mauritshuis, the Hague (F.J. Duparc a.o., Mauritshuis, Hollandse Schilderkunst, Landschappen, 17e eeuw, The Hague, 1980, pp. 21-2, no. 822, illustrated p. 160), while another painted view is in the Institute of Arts, Detroit (inv.no. 33-7).
The Abbey of Rijnsburg was founded in 1133 for noble female Benedictines by Petronella, widow of Count Floris II of Holland. It was largely destroyed during the Siege of Leiden in 1573-4, while one of the towers has been used as a church since 1578 and still stands to this day. Professor Bolten, who is presently preparing an exhibition on prints and drawings of the ruins of the Abbey of Rijnsburg, to be held in the Municipal Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, in spring 1994, has requested the present lot on loan for that exhibition