Skaters on the Vecht in winter, with a slanting tree in the foreground

A silk merchant by profession, Abraham Rutgers was a keen and accomplished amateur draughtsman. Initially self-taught, he later seems later to have come under the influence of Rembrandt through his friendship with Jacob Esselens (circa 1625-1687), a fellow merchant who was also an amateur artist. The present sheet is a characteristic example of his work, showing a daring composition in which strong foreground diagonals are complemented by an elegant regression of perspective. Many of his drawings show views on the river Vecht, near Utrecht, where many of the Amsterdam elite had their country houses and where Rutgers himself very probably had an estate. One of his neighbours would have been Agnes Block, the pioneering botanist who developed a famous garden at her estate of Vijverhof (see lot 70). In this drawing Rutgers uses the familiar motif of a slanting tree to provide a foreground screen through which the frozen river can be seen, bordered by a tow-path. When van Regteren Altena purchased the drawing, he listed it as a view on the Amstel, perhaps because of the striking similarities between the crossed trees here and those on the right-hand side of the View on the Amstel in the Rijksmuseum (inv. RP-T-1902-A-4567). However, another very similar pair of trees appears in the View of Nijenrode Castle on the Vecht in the Fondation Custodia, Paris, which with its identifiable location provides a convincing reason to see the present drawing as another study of the Vecht.

The vast majority of the surviving drawings by Rutgers - 88 of them - are mounted in an album in the Museum Mr Simon van Gijn in Dordrecht, which was probably assembled by the artist himself and presented with a title page bearing the date 1686. Further examples of his draughtsmanship include the Gate to a moated farmhouse in the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (inv. PD.664-1963; The Golden Century: Dutch Master Drawings from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, exhib. cat., Munich, Staatliche Graphische Sammlung and other locations, 1996, no. 22). While many of the surviving drawings are in pen and wash, Rutgers is also known to have worked extensively in red chalk: Cornelis Ploos van Amstel’s sale contained 81 chalk drawings from life, which had probably once been bound in a sketchbook. A pair of drawings in red chalk are in the Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin (invs. KdZ 13694 and 13696; no. 88).