A River Landscape with the Baptism of the Eunuch

In this large drawing by Hendrick Hondius, a sundrenched river landscape, rich with detail, serves as the setting for the baptism of the eunuch, an episode related in the New Testament book Acts of the Apostles (8:26-40). In this biblical passage, the apostle Philip, guided by an angel of the Lord, encounters a eunuch from the court of Queen Candace of Ethiopia in the midst of reading the book of Isaiah. Philip joins the man in his chariot and tells him about the gospel of Christ, inspiring the eunuch to ask to be baptized when they pass by water.

The baptism of the eunuch was a relatively popular subject in the Northern Netherlands in the seventeenth century, particularly among landscape specialists. David Vinckboons, for example, produced at least two paintings in which the episode is embedded within a lush view of land and water. His 1605 version, sold in Cologne in 2017 (Lempertz, May 20, 2017, lot 1031), may have served as a point of departure for Hondius, who, in 1618, published a series of Seasons after Vinckboons and whose various other landscape prints bear a general resemblance to the painter’s work.[1] The Museum’s drawing shares a compositional structure (if largely in reverse) with Vinckboons’s 1605 canvas, featuring an extensive vista framed by a cluster of trees and dense foliage on one side of the image and by a single tree on the other side. The structure at the far right of the drawing is also similar in shape to the landmass in the left background of Vinckboon’s painting, and the narrative scene unfolding across the foreground features a similar cast of characters, if differently costumed. Unlike the Vinckboons and most other Dutch depictions of the scene, however, Hondius presents the eunuch not on dry land receiving a sprinkling of water on his head, but almost entirely immersed in the river. Similarly, Philip does not appear administering the baptismal rite, and it is not easy to locate him within the scene. While he could be the man with the raised hand standing next to the boy holding the eunuch’s clothes or the other figure standing at the water’s edge, with the turban and staff, it is also quite possible that he is not pictured at all. According to the biblical passage, “when they came up out of the water, the Spirit of the Lord suddenly took Philip away, and the eunuch did not see him again….” (8:39).[2] The shepherd tending sheep in the right middle distance of Hondius’s drawing may be an allusion to Christ and his growing flock.

In technique, scale, and finish, the present sheet compares closely with two other drawings by Hondius, both print designs: one, sold at Christie’s Amsterdam on November 11, 1996 (lot 54), that is a design for the engraving Saint John the Baptist Identifying Christ as the Son of God of about 1604, and another, in the Rijksmuseum (inv. 1911.84), that is a fragment of his design for one of the prints in his Prodigal Son series of 1620-22. The three drawings exhibit the same means of rendering foliage, with looping strokes of the pen, filled in with wash, and of conveying the texture of the terrain, with a series of undulating lines. Short, dash dash-like strokes make up the rolling hills in the distance, and the application of brown washes of different degrees of transparency creates a convincing play of light and shadow.[3] Although the Met drawing was not engraved, Hondius may have produced it, like these other two sheets, with a print project in mind.

(JSS, 8/23/2018)


[1] See Nadine M. Orenstein, Hendrick Hondius and the Business of Prints in Seventeenth-Century Holland (Rotterdam: Sound & Vision Interactive, 1996), pp. 68, 73-74, and New Hollstein (Hondius), nos. 70-71.

[2] It has also been proposed that Philip is the rightmost figure in the drawing, walking away from the viewer; see the catalogue of the sale held at Christie’s London, July 10, 2014, lot 15.

[3] See also, for other drawings that, like the Met sheet, incorporate some degree of blue wash, Yvonne Bleyerveld in From Bosch to Bloemaert: Early Netherlandish Drawings in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (Paris: Fondation Custodia, and Bussum: THOTH Publishers, 2014), p. 274.