Catalogue entry no. 50 by William W. Robinson:
Civil authorities in the Dutch Republic tolerated Roman Catholic worship as long as it took place out of sight in a clandestine church (Dutch: schuilkerk), typically a nondescript urban facade that masked an interior richly outfitted with altarpieces and devotional pictures. Jordaens’s Christ Carrying the Cross, for which this drawing was a preparatory study, was commissioned in the late 1650s by the Jesuit mission in Amsterdam. Although its original destination might have been another clandestine house of worship, the church of Saint Francis Xavier (nicknamed “De Krijtberg,” or Chalk Hill, after the house it occupied) possessed the altarpiece from an early date (Fig. 1). A resident of the officially Catholic Spanish Netherlands, Jordaens joined the Reformed Church around the time he painted this altarpiece for a Jesuit schuilkerk in Amsterdam. Artists of the period readily followed patrons’ iconographic programs without adopting their beliefs, and after his conversion, Jordaens continued to produce devotional works for Catholic institutions and private persons in the southern Netherlands.
Of the four surviving studies for Christ Carrying the Cross, the Harvard drawing is the only one for the entire composition. While the design generally corresponds to that on the canvas, nearly every figure that appears in both drawing and painting has undergone some revisions, and further studies must have followed the Harvard work. In addition to repositioning the cross, Jordaens inserted a bearer with a basket on his head at the left and one of the thieves and his guard at the bottom of the picture. He also eliminated the woman, her child, and the head of a man at the lower right and relocated the figure of Simon of Cyrene (relegated to the far left in the study) by conflating it with the shirtless man who leans over the cross. Some of these changes are projected in the drawing by a few lines scribbled over the first state of the composition. The artist used red chalk to define a revised figure of Simon of Cyrene with his head above the crossbar, his arm around it, and his legs extended toward the head of the dog. A rectangle and other angular lines drawn in black chalk above the top of the cross suggest Jordaens rethought its length and orientation, and he used brown ink to modify the contours of Veronica’s cloth and the lower half of her dress. The close-up study of the central group, now in the Pushkin Museum, Moscow, is farther removed from the picture than the Harvard composition and must have preceded it in the design process (Fig. 2). Detail studies from models for the heads of Simon of Cyrene and Veronica, both in black, red, and white chalks, belong to the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.
The composite support of the Harvard work exemplifies Jordaens’s practice of drawing on pieced-together rectangles, strips, and irregular scraps of paper. In most cases, he assembled the pieces before he began to draw, his sole motivation apparently being an obsessive drive to economize on paper. In other instances, such as this one, he cut and pasted to excise and substitute parts of a composition or he enlarged the support to accommodate an extension of the design. Here, the support consists of seven pieces. Nearly all of the composition is on one upright rectangular sheet. After completing an initial sketch on that piece, he probably trimmed it at the bottom. Narrow, vertical strips pasted over its right and left sides increased the width of the support a few millimeters. In some places, such as the ankle and foot of Simon of Cyrene at the far left, these strips cover the first sketch on the main support and the passage was redrawn on the vertical strip. Additional vertical and horizontal strips were adhered to the verso of the central rectangle on all four sides. Their ends and edges protrude at the top and bottom, extending the main support vertically by several millimeters. Some details at the edges of the composition, such as the lower part of Veronica’s foot in the bottom right corner, were drawn on the projecting segments of these underlying strips.
A copy of the Harvard drawing by a pupil in the Jordaens workshop has also survived.
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