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Lot Essay
The son of an Amsterdam merchant, Jan de Bisschop studied law at Leiden University and made a career as an advocate at the Court of Holland in The Hague. Although not a professional artist, he had developed a passion for drawing as a boy, when he had taken lessons from Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598-1657) as part of a broad humanist education. He continued to draw and etch throughout his life and, along with some fellow men of letters in The Hague, founded the city's first life-drawing academy in 1660. Both his technique, with layers of translucent wash set off by highlights of untouched paper, and his love of Classical Italianate themes were inspired by his teacher Breenbergh.
There is still no firm evidence that Jan de Bisschop ever travelled to Italy, although arguments have been made for trips in either 1655 or 1657. Whether or not he visited the country, he certainly made many copies after paintings by Italian old masters, predominantly in order to collect a series of models from which artists could study the classicist perfection of Renaissance and Baroque art. Some of his copies, such as the Allegory of the power of Venus after Alessandro Turchi (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), were drawn directly from pictures in Dutch private collections; while others, such as the Saint Roch in prison after Tintoretto's Scuole Grande di San Rocco cycle (Prentenkabinet of the Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden), were probably based on intermediary copies (in this case a drawn copy of the painting by Agostino Carracci, which was in the collection of Jan van der Does in The Hague; see Jan de Bisschop: Episcopius: avocaat en tekenaar, exhib. cat., Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 1992, nos. 32 and 34). The present case is, however, more enigmatic. Fomicieva (op. cit.) argues persuasively that de Bisschop must have made this directly from the original painting rather than from an engraving of the picture. Abraham Blooteling did publish a print of Judith in circa 1650, engraved in the same sense as the painting by an artist named 'L. Sa.', but in that print the composition is trimmed at the top, whereas this drawing preserves the dimensions of the painting, and the print also omits the ivy growing on the wall behind Judith, which does appear in this drawing and which was painted over in the picture, only to be revealed by cleaning in the 20th Century (Formicieva, op. cit.).
The provenance of Giorgione's Judith is still unclear prior to its appearance in 1711 in the collection of the Parisian financier Pierre-Vincent Bertin (1653-1711). Sir Oliver Millar argued that it was the 'little Judith', then thought to be by Raphael, which was in the collection of King Charles I of England, who gave it to the third Earl of Pembroke in circa 1640 as part of an exchange (O. Millar, The Queen's Pictures, London, 1977, p. 35). If so, the painting may well have been among the many pictures auctioned in Amsterdam during the turbulent years that followed, which may explain how de Bisschop came to have seen the original. After Bertin's death in 1711, the painting entered the collection of Pierre Crozat (1661-1740), and in 1771 his heirs sold it, along with many of Crozat's other masterpieces, to Aleksandr Mikhailovich Golitsyn, the agent of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. It has been in the Russian imperial collection, and then the Hermitage, ever since. It continued to be generally regarded as a work by Raphael until the mid-19th Century, when an attribution to Giorgione became widely accepted.
There is still no firm evidence that Jan de Bisschop ever travelled to Italy, although arguments have been made for trips in either 1655 or 1657. Whether or not he visited the country, he certainly made many copies after paintings by Italian old masters, predominantly in order to collect a series of models from which artists could study the classicist perfection of Renaissance and Baroque art. Some of his copies, such as the Allegory of the power of Venus after Alessandro Turchi (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam), were drawn directly from pictures in Dutch private collections; while others, such as the Saint Roch in prison after Tintoretto's Scuole Grande di San Rocco cycle (Prentenkabinet of the Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden), were probably based on intermediary copies (in this case a drawn copy of the painting by Agostino Carracci, which was in the collection of Jan van der Does in The Hague; see Jan de Bisschop: Episcopius: avocaat en tekenaar, exhib. cat., Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis, 1992, nos. 32 and 34). The present case is, however, more enigmatic. Fomicieva (op. cit.) argues persuasively that de Bisschop must have made this directly from the original painting rather than from an engraving of the picture. Abraham Blooteling did publish a print of Judith in circa 1650, engraved in the same sense as the painting by an artist named 'L. Sa.', but in that print the composition is trimmed at the top, whereas this drawing preserves the dimensions of the painting, and the print also omits the ivy growing on the wall behind Judith, which does appear in this drawing and which was painted over in the picture, only to be revealed by cleaning in the 20th Century (Formicieva, op. cit.).
The provenance of Giorgione's Judith is still unclear prior to its appearance in 1711 in the collection of the Parisian financier Pierre-Vincent Bertin (1653-1711). Sir Oliver Millar argued that it was the 'little Judith', then thought to be by Raphael, which was in the collection of King Charles I of England, who gave it to the third Earl of Pembroke in circa 1640 as part of an exchange (O. Millar, The Queen's Pictures, London, 1977, p. 35). If so, the painting may well have been among the many pictures auctioned in Amsterdam during the turbulent years that followed, which may explain how de Bisschop came to have seen the original. After Bertin's death in 1711, the painting entered the collection of Pierre Crozat (1661-1740), and in 1771 his heirs sold it, along with many of Crozat's other masterpieces, to Aleksandr Mikhailovich Golitsyn, the agent of the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia. It has been in the Russian imperial collection, and then the Hermitage, ever since. It continued to be generally regarded as a work by Raphael until the mid-19th Century, when an attribution to Giorgione became widely accepted.