A landscape near Düren with pollarded willows by a stream

Details

Wenceslaus Hollar (Prague 1607-1677 London)
A landscape near Düren with pollarded willows by a stream
signed and dated 'WH 1631' and inscribed 'bei deiren'
black chalk, pen and black-brown wash, brown ink framing lines
3¼ x 6¾ in. (83 x 172 mm.)

Provenance

Anonymous sale; Foster's, 11 November 1921 (10s. to Oppé).

Literature

F. Springell, Hollar Handzeichnungen, Vienna, 1938, no. 175, fig. 69.
H. Appel, Wenzel Hollar in Düren, Düren, 1957, no. 80, pl. 25.

Exhibited

Manchester, Manchester City Art Gallery, Wenceslaus Hollar, 1607-1677: drawings, paintings and etchings, 1963, no. D24.

Special notice

No VAT will be charged on the hammer price, but VAT at 15% will be added to the buyer's premium which is invoiced on a VAT inclusive basis.

Lot Essay

Hollar left Prague, city of his birth, at the age of 20. In about 1630, after a brief period living in Strasburg and Stuttgart, he settled in Cologne. A number of his landscape drawings and etchings of the Rhineland, and from two excursions south to the Danube, survive. The present drawing is the earliest record of a visit to Düren, a town in the Duchy of Jülich between Cologne and Aachen, which would be the subject of a number of etchings and landscape drawings. There are a number of working drawings of the environs of Düren dated 1632 in a sketchbook in the John Rylands Library at the University of Manchester, and in 1634 he was working on his etching of a bird's eye view of the town (Parthey 841). Another drawing inscribed 'Bei Düren', of similar composition to the present drawing, is in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (H. Geissler, Zeichnung in Deutschland, Deutsche Zeichner 1540-1640, Stuttgart, 1980, no. P10).
In 1636 Hollar met the Earl of Arundel on the latter's ill-fated mission to the Emperor Ferdinand II, and returned with him to London.

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