Landscape with a Walled City and a Large Body of Water

This delicate pen and ink drawing shows a rustic, rural landscape with farmhouses along the waterside and a walled city in the distance. Boats of various form and size occupy the waters. A solitary tree divides the composition in two.

The author of this sheet is currently unidentified. In both style and composition, the drawing shows strong a resemblance to the work of the Netherlandish landscapists Cornelis Massys (1510–ca. 1556/57), Matthijs Cock (ca. 1509/10–before 1548), and the enigmatic Master of the Errera Sketchbook. These mid-sixteenth-century artists specialized in creating fanciful scenes, inspired by the Flemish countryside. Noticeable inaccuracies in perspective and proportion, visible in our drawing, however, cannot be reconciled with the skill of these more accomplished draftsmen. Note for example the distorted perspective with which the riverbank to the left of the central tree is depicted, as well as the overall lack of coherence within the composition. The crude diagonal hatching marks in the upper foliage of the tree are done in a different ink and probably were added by a later hand.

The Farmhouse by the Waterside is closely related to an etching from an anonymous series of small landscapes, kept in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris, as well as to a print by the Master IQV, a printmaker at the court of Fontainebleau.[1] Both show largely the same scenery as our drawing. In the foreground of the first print, however, a road, vegetation and numerous figures have been added. The landscape in the second print is somewhat cropped, and the boats in the foreground have been slightly relocated. This time, no road or figures were added, but the vegetation flourishes.

Although it is tempting to think that our drawing served as the model for both these prints, this relationship proves problematic. Both printed landscapes show something that looks like a little ladder, standing at the waterfront, left of the central tree. This object is missing in the drawing, and it therefore seems unlikely that the sheet was used by the printmakers as a model. It would suggest that our drawing is a copy after a now lost original.

[1] Cf. C. Jenkins, ‘Landscape in Fontainebleau School Print’, Print Quarterly XXIII (2006), no. 2, pp. 114–17.