Entry by
Susan Anderson,
completed November 01, 2017:
This drawing of a courtyard and surrounding buildings was inspired by a group of unpopulated scenes of rustic architecture by Isaac van Ostade, the short-lived younger brother of Adriaen van Ostade. Both brothers painted and drew peasant genre subjects in Haarlem during the 17th century. None of Isaac’s drawings, in whole or in part, served as a direct model for our composition or its elements. Adriaen van Ostade’s last student, Cornelis Dusart, has been suggested as the artist responsible for this sheet, as he copied several of Isaac’s unpopulated scenes and invented many others. Ultimately, this is unconvincing: the pen line is too haphazard, and the man and woman at the lower right do not demonstrate Dusart’s confident figural style. The draftsmanship is close enough to Isaac and Dusart, however, to place our drawing at the end of the 17th century, and it fits among a wider group of similarly inspired architectural scenes whose hands remain unidentified.
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