A standing man in oriental costume

The present lot, along with other drawings by this hand have had a convoluted attribution history - at times being given to Annibale Carracci, Antoine Watteau, and van den Bergh's son, Matthijs. They are now considered to be by Jan due to their similarities to a signed worked, Kneeling beggar (Warsaw University Library Print Room, inv.T.173, no. 57/I; Master European drawings from Polish collections, exh. cat., Kansas City, Nelson-Atkins Museum, 1993, no. 4), that is a study for a figure in Jan's painting, Saint Elizabeth giving alms to a beggar. These drawings, done in red chalk heightened with white chalk share a distinct hatching where the artist does not pick up his chalk for every new line, but rather zig-zags down the page, with the lines often overlapping from the figure to the background. This technique can be seen, for example, in two other drawings attributed to van den Bergh that may also depict the same bearded model as the present sheet: Standing man in oriental costume (Morgan Library, New York, Acc. no. 1985.66; J.S. Turner, Dutch drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth centuries, New York, 2006, I, p. 35, no. 28; II, no. 28), and Profile study of a seated old man, resting his forehead on his left hand (anonymous sale; Sotheby's, London, 2 July 1997, lot 44). Van den Bergh studied with Hendrick Goltzius in Haarlem, and then Rubens in Antwerp.