by Cécile Tainturier
Translated from French by Susan Wise

Frits Lugt & Rembrandt

A very young biographer
The Dutch collector Frits Lugt (1884 - 1970) was very young when he first grew deeply interested in Rembrandt, then collecting the master’s graphic works all his life. At first he had to become familiar with the drawings by studying albums of facsimiles. The great monographic exhibition devoted to Rembrandt in Amsterdam in September 1898 was a revelation to the fourteen-year old youth. A year after he began writing a biography of the master, illustrated with copies he drew himself after the artist’s drawings and prints. This exercise enabled him to have a thorough knowledge of Rembrandt’s style, exactly as the latter’s pupils learned to possess their master’s manner.

fig. 1 RembrandtHarmensz. van Rijn
Interior with Saskia in bed
142 x 177mm; pen and brown ink, brown and grey wash, some additions in red and black chalk
Paris, Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia

A Rembrandt expert
Frits Lugt was such a gifted connoisseur that he did not complete his secondary schooling nor  undertake university training, having been immediately employed in the art market: the important Amsterdam auction house, Frederik Muller & Cie, requested his services when he was only seventeen. This is where Frits Lugt was able to become even more familiar with the oeuvre of Rembrandt and his circle. He drew up the catalogue of the prestigious sale of John Postle Heseltine’s London collection of drawings in 1913.

fig. 2 Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn
Woman with a child frightened by a dog
103 x 102mm; pen and brown ink
Paris, Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia

Two years later Lugt published his Wandelingen met Rembrandt in Amsterdam (Rembrandt’s Amsterdam), a study in which he presented the places where the artist had drawn. It was followed in 1920 by a revised edition including the sheets executed near Utrecht and in the Gelderland. Lugt fully grasped the important role of topography in Rembrandt’s landscapes, but he also deemed it essential to show that the artist did his drawings from life. This was confirmed to him by the fact that in many cases the same subject was represented on several sheets but from different viewpoints, and that his pupils drew in the same real, not imaginary, places, occasionally alongside the master. Frits Lugt’s research into Dutch drawings and especially Rembrandt and his school made great strides in the 1920s when the Louvre assigned him to catalogue its drawings of the Northern Schools (six volumes published between 1929 and 1968). Subsequently Lugt published the catalogues raisonnés of the Northern drawings of the other public cabinets of graphic arts in Paris (that of the Petit Palais
in 1927, the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1936 and the École des Beaux Arts in 1950). To prepare the publication of the Louvre volume on Rembrandt Lugt visited the principal European collections to become familiar with the ensemble of his work.

fig. 3 Gerbrand van den Eeckhout
A youth smoking
159 x 138mm; point of the brush and brown ink, brown and some grey wash
Paris, Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia

Frits Lugt collector of Rembrandt and his circle
While he was adding subtlety and depth to his knowledge Lugt began to acquire drawings by  Rembrandt. As early as 1919 he purchased the masterly Interior with Saskia in Bed (fig. 1), today still one of the highlights of the collection. The fondness Lugt had for this sheet was owed in part to the intimate character of this domestic scene. This taste can be found in quite a few other drawings by the master that Lugt purchased: his studies of women with children (fig. 2)—the collection has at least four - the Young Woman Having her Hair Combed or again the melancholy Woman Leaning on a Window - sill with its bold wash. In addition to important sheets of biblical scenes the collector bought landscapes including the outstanding representation of the mill on the Blauwhoofd bastion in Amsterdam.

fig. 4 Govert Flinck
Reclining female nude
249 x 412mm; black and yellowish white chalk on blue paper
Paris, Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia

As regards the sheets from Rembrandt’s circle, Lugt collected them at the same time as the master’s. Among them we can discern a few of the art historian’s predilections. One of them was the work of Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, Rembrandt’s pupil for several years before 1641. The collection includes sixteen drawings by this gifted artist whose production was extremely varied. Perhaps this very characteristic is what particularly appealed to Lugt when he purchased his history compositions drawn from the Bible, Fable or contemporary political events, his wash drawings of a dog and that of a Youth Smoking (fig.3), his preparatory sheets for prints or again his landscapes. Govert Flinck is another one of these pupils who were very close to the master.

The collection features eight drawings from his hand, including the study of a female nude on blue paper which the artist executed in the 1640s (fig. 4) when he had already left Rembrandt’s studio. But it may have been there that his choice to work from the nude arose or was confirmed.  Indeed the sittings Rembrandt organised in his studio were not a common practice in the Netherlands in the seventeenth century (and especially with female models).

fig. 5 Philips Koninck
River landscape with a town on the horizon
75 x 196mm; pen and brown ink, brown wash, watercolour
Paris, Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia

Besides the pupils whose apprenticeship with Rembrandt is confirmed by the sources, Lugt collected not only the precursors of his art like Peter Lastman, his master in Amsterdam, or the Pynas brothers, but also other artists more remotely connected with Rembrandt. Thus relations between Philips Koninck and Rembrandt are not clear. The two artists may have been in contact and drawn together as some of his figure studies suggest. Conversely, in his lovely River landscape with a town on the horizon, Koninck with his extremely precise ink and watercolour wash evokesNature in an utterly personal way (fig. 5).

Among the artists who worked in Rembrandt’s orbit we should also mention Lambert Doomer, whose work is particularly well represented in the collection with sixteen drawings (fig. 6). Most are washed in watercolour. Lugt purchased these evocations, at once naturalistic and picturesque, of French, German or Dutch countryside and towns throughout his collector’s career.

fig. 6 LambertDoomer
View of Mönchengladbach
243 x 398mm; black chalk,brown, grey, greyish green and ochre watercolour
Paris, Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia