Study of a Bearded and Turbaned Man Carrying a Chest

Not more than twenty surviving drawings are accepted as by the hand of the Amsterdam history painter Pieter Lastman. Eleven of them are figure studies executed in red chalk on orange-toned paper. While a few of these appear to be preliminary studies for specific paintings, others, including the present sheet, may have been produced by Lastman without a singular purpose in mind and served instead as a repertory of figure types, poses, facial expressions, and costumes from which he could cull for any number of pictures—a useful resource for an artist inclined to include in his works a preponderance of figures both central and subsidiary to the stories depicted.

The bearded and turbaned man in the Museum’s drawing appears precisely in no known painting, but brings to mind similarly muscular figures with heads turned to the left and with bent arms in Lastman’s Sacrifice of Juno of 1630 (Nationalmuseum, Stockholm) and Triumph of Sesostris of 1631 (Legion of Honor, San Francisco). He also recalls the figure of Odysseus in Lastman’s 1625 painting of the hero carrying a large wine cooler (Rembrandt House, Amsterdam). The vaguely eastern headdress and all’antica costume worn by the man in the drawing are hallmarks of Lastman’s reimagination of the ancient and biblical worlds.

The sheet has all the characteristics of a study drawn from a live model. A rapid and lively handling of chalk captures the contraction of the muscles in the man’s chest, arm, and leg as he grips and hoists the chest. Modeling of the body is achieved largely through stumping (the rubbing and blending of the chalk with rolled-up paper or cloth). The practice of drawing from life, while not unprecedented in the Netherlands, would become increasingly common amongst the next generation of Dutch artists, for whom Lastman’s work remained a much-admired example. Notably, an album of his drawings—very possibly these red chalk studies—appears in the 1656 inventory of the possessions of his former pupil Rembrandt.

(JSS, 7/5/18)