DROST, Willem

Willem Drost was a pupil of Rembrandt. His presence in Rembrandt’s studio is undocumented, however, his works suggest that he had contact with the master in the late 1640s or early 1650s. Support for connecting him with Rembrandt is given by his sensuous, half-length Bathsheba dated 1654 which was unmistakable inspired by Rembrandt’s superb painting done in the same year of the same subject, also in the Louvre, Paris. Drost’s beautiful half-nude Bathsheba captures none of the overtones of Uriah’s wife’s story sensed in Rembrandt’s moving portrayal of her contemplating her decision to go to David, but it impresses by the smooth painting of the palpable glowing flesh set off by heavy impasto of the drapery and its strong chiaroscuro effect.

This painting is a remarkable synthesis of the artist’s early training in Amsterdam under Rembrandt and the more mature style he developed in Venice, when he came under the direct spell of Titian, to whom this work is a clear homage. Titian’s own Flora is known to have been in Amsterdam in the collection of Alfonso L�pez, a Spaniard in the service of Cardinal Richelieu, but Drost probably did not see it in person. Rembrandt almost certainly did, and Drost would very likely have been aware of the design through drawings and prints of it.

This portrait has a pendant, Portrait of a Woman, signed and dated 1653, now in the Museum Bredius, The Hague. The young man in the portrait resembles Drost as he appears in his etched self-portrait of 1652. On this basis it was proposed that the painting is a self-portrait, and its pendant represents the painter’s fianc�e.

Earlier the painting was attributed to Jan Vermeer van Delft.

Drost’s Roman Charity is a remarkable synthesis of the artist’s early training in Amsterdam under Rembrandt and the more mature style he developed in Venice, when he came under the direct spell of both Titian and the Italian tenebrist movement made popular by Jusepe de Ribera. His Italian oeuvre reveals a strong affinity for this tenebrist style prevalent in Venice at the time.

Of the examples of ‘filial piety’ in the literature of antiquity, that of Cimon and Pero was one of the ones that appealed most to artists of the 16th to 18th centuries in Italy and the Netherlands. Valerius Maximus tells of a certain Cimon, an aged man, who was in prison awaiting execution and who was therefore given no food. The jailer allowed Cimon’s daughter Pero to visit him. She nourished him by giving him her breast. The scene is a prison cell; the prisoner, manacled, reclines in the lap of a young woman who is suckling him.

This picture was painted by the young artist when he was still in Amsterdam and very much under the influence of Rembrandt. Presumably, the title The Sibyl was chosen on analogy with the similarly posed and comparably dressed figure in Domenichino’s celebrated Cumaean Sibyl of about 1616-17. One of the many painted copies of that picture was probably seen by Drost in the Netherlands. Drost appears to have chosen the subject as in his erotic Bathsheba) as a mere pretext for the image of an erotic creature.