GHEYN, Jacob de II

Two common vanitas symbols, cut flowers and smoke, rise from urns occupy the lower corners of the engraving, while in the centre a child is making bubbles.

This is one of De Gheyn’s most characteristic animal drawings. The frogs are observed with great accuracy, although only the one in the top right-hand corner is in a natural pose. It is not known whether the artist used stuffed frogs or live ones pinned in place. At the beginning of the seventeenth century there was considerable interest in faithful depictions of nature, as well as in nature itself. De Gheyn, and his tutor Hendrick Goltzius, are among the great Dutch painters of animals.

Jacques de Gheyn the Younger was a draughtsman, engraver and painter. Although, like his teacher Hendrick Goltzius, his early works exhibit a fantasy-like, mannerist style, from around 1600 he began to draw naturalistic nudes, including Four Studies of a Woman. There is no longer any question of erotic tension or of artificial, standard poses, as when Goltzius drew live models. De Gheyn observes a woman during her daily round, combing her long hair and then plaiting it, activities that he captures in black chalk on the left- and right- hand sides of the page. The two sketches in the middle were probably done from memory without the model in front of him. The frank realism with which the female body is depicted here was something totally new in Dutch art. These nudes show De Gheyn’s great knowledge of human anatomy, revealed through his superior drawing technique. Using slightly curved hatchings he succeeds so precisely and naturally in indicating the passage from harder to softer parts of the body, that even the internal structure of the skeleton becomes tangible.

This sheet belongs to a group of drawings from 1602-03, showing women asleep or at their toilet. These very intimate studies of human beings in natural poses were perhaps produced under the influence of contemporary Venetian nudes and continue a tradition of anatomical studies going back to Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht D�rer. De Gheyn’s personal and extensive corpus of works suggests that for him drawing had become a more independent activity, with the result that we have a relatively large number of exercise sheets from his hand, like the present example. Even so, at times he transposed figures from such studies into other compositions that were not drawn from life and which concealed a symbolic significance. Many artists later in the 17th century were to use figure studies drawn from life in various paintings produced from imagination, and De Gheyn can be seen as a pioneer of this practice. Added to this he was one of the first northern artists to depict scenes from family life with a directness and warmth that were to be so typical of Rembrandt’s drawings.

In this late drawing by the artist, we can see a painterly approach created by the dark bundles of lines and the parts left white.

Democritus, the famous laughing philosopher - who is predominantly depicted with the crying Heraclitus - was so utterly fascinated by anatomy that he was thought to be bordering on madness and so Hippocrates, the famous physician, was called to see him. De Gheyn depicted the scene according to a uniquely original concept: the obsessed Democritus is about to slay a sheep to quench his thirst for knowledge.

This half-length depiction of the married sea gods whose love is symbolized by the Cupid and the shells that accompany them was originally described in Wallraf’s collection as ‘Italian’. He was deceived probably by the decorative elegance of its colour and line, and by the type of the double half-length, which originated in Italy.

During his early years, Jacob de Gheyn followed the Sprangerian version of Late Mannerism. A major contribution to the process of developing his own style was the execution of his study drawings, which for the most part depict human figures and heads, on the same sheet in many cases, partly drawn after life and partly from memory.

The present sheet from the artist’s late period contains the depictions of five male heads, a cherub and a fortress.

Arms drill was a highly developed practice in the Dutch Republic, elucidated in a manual first published in 1607 and illustrated by Jacob de Gheyn II. Rembrandt may have referred to its prints as he painted the the figures wielding muskets in his Nightwatch, for their poses conform strikingly to those in the illustrations shown here.

This painting is regarded as the earliest known vanitas still-life painted in the Netherlands. The genre flourished from the 1620s onward.

The dominant motifs in the picture are a human skull and, floating above it, a transparent sphere or bubble. These forms occupy a stone niche with a slightly pointed arch, the keystone of which is inscribed HVMANA VANA (Human Vanity). The spandrels flanking the arch are filled with sculptural figures of philosophers with books at their feet? to the left, Democritus, who gestures toward the globe and laughs; and, to the right, Heraclitus, who points to the sphere and weeps. The sphere purposefully resembles a soap bubble, the familiar vanitas motif. Two common vanitas symbols, cut flowers and smoke, rise from urns at either side of the niche. The coins depicted at the bottom of the composition on the sill between the vases were used as currency in the Netherlands about 1600. One of them, the silver medal of 1602 commemorates the capture of a Portuguese galleon by two Zeeland merchant ships earlier that year, off Saint Helena in the South Atlantic.

Democritus (c. 460 - c. 370 B.C.) and Heraclitus (c. 540 - c. 475 B.C.) are known as the ‘laughing and crying philosophers.’

Democritus, a Greek philosopher, born at Abdera in Thrace, was known as the laughing philosopher because he found amusement in the folly of mankind. (The citizens of Abdera were proverbially stupid.) His philosophic system was contrasted with that of the earlier Heraclitus of Ephesus, who was known as the ‘Dark’ or ‘Obscure’ and was reputed to be melancholic. They were linked as a contrasting pair by Seneca, by Juvenal and others. Florentine humanists, to whom such classical texts were well-known used the pair to support the view that a cheerful demeanour was proper to a philosopher.

The two philosophers are widely represented in European painting of the Renaissance and Baroque period, either in one picture or as companion pieces. A fifteenth-century example is Bramante’s fresco, but the subject was especially common in Dutch art of the seventeenth century.

The coins depicted at the bottom of the composition on the sill between the vases were used as currency in the Netherlands about 1600. One of them, the silver medal of 1602 commemorates the capture of a Portuguese galleon by two Zeeland merchant ships earlier that year, off Saint Helena in the South Atlantic.

Jacob de Gheyn II, an engraver and painter, was Goltzius’s pupil. He matches his teacher as a draughtsman and at times even surpasses him. like his teacher, de Gheyn was equally gifted with pen, metal-point and chalk, but he did not have Goltzius’s compulsion to make an ostentatious display of his virtuosity. De Gheyn’s pen line frequently resembles the technique of engraving in its swelling and diminution and extensive use of hatching and dots to model form, but his touch is more nervous and hence seems less impersonal. His choice of subject range from ghostly drawings of witches’ sabbaths to tender domestic scenes such as his Woman and Child looking at a Picture Book at Berlin. If any of the early Dutch draughtsmen gives a foretaste of Rembrandt in spiritedness of line and vivacity of characterization, it is de Gheyn.