View of Lyon and the river Saône from the north-west

This view of Lyon is taken from the north-west, probably from the Château de Pierre-Scize, a fortress which was destroyed during the Revolution. On a hill on the other side of the river is the Château-Gaillard a large building flanked by four towers, also no longer extant. A little further to the right is the Couvent des Carmélites, and in the background toward the left the Chartreuse. Some inaccuracies in the rendering of the topography may indicate that the drawing was not done from life.

The authorship of this impressive drawing remains uncertain. Monogrammed ‘AW’, it was exhibited in the 1976-77 exhibition as Anthonie Waterloo and it can indeed be compared to a View of the bridge at Francheville, near Lyon, also from the van Regteren Altena collection (Christie’s, London, 7 July 2014, lot 63). However there is no documentary evidence that Waterloo ever stayed in Lyon and the drawing was attributed to Vincent Laurensz. van der Vinne (1628-1702) in the 2008 exhibition Paysages de France at the Fondation Custodia. Van der Vinne travelled in Germany, France and Switzerland from 1652 to 1655 and two illustrated manuscript versions of his Journal (both today at the Noord-Holland Archief in Haarlem) document his itinerary quite precisely. He stayed for about two months in Lyon in 1654. Yet his drawings in the two Journals show looser handling and his use of pen and brown ink, absent from the present drawing.