CODART, Dutch and Flemish art in museums worldwide

The Project

When Lambert Doomer drew Cologne Cathedral (fig. 1), it looked different than it does today, as the tower had remained unfinished for more than a hundred years. Until 1868, the stump crowned by a crane was a landmark for all who visited the city. And there were many, including Dutch artists who traveled along the Rhine or were looking for a place of refuge in troubled times.

The close connection between Cologne and the Netherlands is also reflected in over 900 Netherlandish drawings kept in the Collection of Prints and Drawings of Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud. The earliest is a workshop copy after Rogier van der Weyden (1399/1400–1464) from ca. 1460, the most recent a study sheet by James Ensor (1860–1949) from 1880.

Cataloguing these drawings was the goal of the project Expedition Zeichnung (“Expedition Drawing”). Those familiar with the collection know that there is already a collection catalogue, written in 1983 by the curator at that time, Hella Robels (1922–2002). [1] Presenting 849 drawings on 269 pages, Robels’s catalogue is exemplary in both its soundness and its concise descriptions, with many attributions having stood the test of time. However, it devotes rather too little attention to certain areas that are nowadays considered crucial to research on drawings. This applies especially to the treatment of material aspects: the information provided is brief, occasionally incomplete and imprecise, and in some cases incorrect. At the same time, recent Wallraf exhibition publications helped boost the current focus on the materiality of paper: a series curated by Thomas Ketelsen, highlighting so-called marginal techniques, made Cologne a hub for such research. They included Der Abklatsch: Eine Kunst für sich (Cologne 2014) and Die Kunst der Pause: Transparenz und Wiederholung, co-edited with Iris Brahms (Cologne 2017).

Along with the change of focus from stylistic criticism to a more comprehensive approach, the collection itself has also changed since 1983 as a result of new acquisitions and discoveries. For instance, in the year 2000, the curator at that time, Uwe Westfehling, found a trio of Rubens studies after the Antique in a bundle of duplicates (fig. 2). In addition, numerous monographs, catalogues, articles, and surveys have been published in the forty years since “Robels 1983,” all of which were waiting to be incorporated.

For these reasons, we – that is, Anne Buschhoff, head of the Wallraf’s Graphische Sammlung, and myself, as an independent researcher – made the decision to update the Robels catalogue – or, rather, to take a fresh look at the collection as a whole. During the pandemic, we were fortunate to receive grants for Expedition Zeichnung from the Ernst von Siemens Kunststiftung in Berlin and the Fritz Thyssen Stiftung in Cologne, to fund three-and-a-half years of art-historical research, from February 2021 to July 2024. The museum also received funding from Restaurierungsprogramm Bildende Kunst des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen for a restoration campaign, which was carried out by the freelance restorer Melanie Lindner from 2022 to 2024.

Working method

Given the museum’s name, it is unsurprising that a large part of the Wallraf-Richartz’s holdings in Netherlandish drawings date from the bequest of Ferdinand Franz Wallraf (1748–1824). However, we still lack information as to when and how these drawings entered Wallraf’s collection. For example: the inventory drawn up in 1865 by Johann Anton Ramboux (1790–1866) lists 572 Netherlandish drawings on only half a page. Hella Robels had little choice but to categorize these holdings simply as “Alter Bestand” (“old stock”).

Furthermore, the versos of most of the drawings contain hardly any annotations. This made our project a true expedition, of a kind that crosses rough terrain with only the occasional signpost. We therefore decided to begin by examining the material, treating the drawings as sources and logging information supplied in the form of technical details including the support, such as the sequence of layers, pentimenti and retouching, and traces of transfer and handling. This materials-oriented approach differs from the more conventional method of stylistic criticism (which we naturally also included in our research). Given the time frame, we focused on drawings from before 1800. Nineteenth-century drawings were examined in advance but not with a view to their inclusion in the catalogue.

In addition to the autopsy carried out by myself, more than half of the collection underwent additional investigation in close collaboration with Thomas Klinke, the museum’s in-house restorer and art technologist for drawings and prints. We used stereo and digital microscopes, visible light, side light, transmitted light, UV and IR reflectography, and high-resolution digital imaging to probe the drawings in depth. This technical examination was not limited to works by prominent artists. Rather, it was applied to all “drawings with potential,” including anonymous works and copies – which two categories account for a sizeable part of the collection. Guided by literature as well as our fascination with rare techniques and unusual phenomena, Thomas Klinke and I decided which drawings should be studied in more depth. This sifting process called for experience and a trained eye – qualities generally associated with the notion of connoisseurship. In Expedition Zeichnung, we would describe it as a complex and multilayered system of interrogation, with questions varying from one case to the next: so we took our cue from the drawings themselves.

Results

After conducting three-and-a-half years of research and interdisciplinary dialogue, the collection of Netherlandish drawings in the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud has been restructured in its larger parts.

First, the collection’s scope and its boundaries were revised. Some two hundred drawings have been excluded. Of these, one-third has now been assigned to the nineteenth century, a further third to German, Italian, or French schools (in some cases with new attributions), while for the final third even assignation to a national school proved to be impossible. In order not to lose these drawings for future research, we will include them as an appendix in the forthcoming publication, under the provisional heading of “No-Man’s-Land.”

At the same time, a large number of drawings from German, French and Italian schools have now been classified as Netherlandish. These include a drawing now attributed to Hubert Quellinus (fig. 3) that was formerly listed as by Johann Anton de Peters (1725–1795). It was discovered among works from the German school by Michael Venator. The red chalk counterproof of a Resting Ram (fig. 4), previously “Anonymous, German or Dutch” (its eighteenth-century attribution to “Van der Does” was overlooked) could be confidently attributed to Adriaen van de Velde. It corresponds (in reverse image) to a painted motif by the artist in Madrid.

Some drawings acquired a different status within an artist’s oeuvre. View of Kampen between Broederpoort and Kalverhekkenpoort (fig. 5) was published by Robels as “manner of Avercamp” (no. 98). However, recent research, confirmed by Marijn Schapelhouman and Theo van Mierlo, has found it to be an early drawing by Avercamp himself.

Christ and the Adulteress (fig. 6) has also been rehabilitated. Catalogued as a genuine Rembrandt by Robels (no. 218), it was not included in Peter Schatborn’s list of Rembrandt drawings (2019). In recent museum publications, it was given to the artist’s studio, but the latest research, in agreement with Martin Royalton-Kisch, is indeed suggestive of the master’s hand.

In the case of a landscape that Robels catalogued as by Pieter Mulier II (no. 190) (fig. 7), but which attribution had been questioned on account of its unusual palette, technical examination showed that the colored chalks lie above a pen drawing that itself fits into Mulier’s oeuvre without reservation.

Some of these changes in attribution naturally involve downgrades, the most prominent of which being a drawing formerly attributed to Nicolaes Maes (Robels 1983, no. 182).

The professor and canon Ferdinand Franz Wallraf was an avid collector who was known both for accumulating works of art and for saving them in times of revolution and secularization. As a collector, he was guided not by principles of connoisseurship, but by his encyclopedic and pedagogical interests. This may explain the many drawn copies in his collection. These proved to be a very fruitful research area, prompting me to distinguish different categories within this genre – youthful works by known masters, works by professional copyists, and works by anonymous amateurs, to name but a few. Copies tell their own stories of taste and training, and they occasionally document lost or damaged originals.

Our research also included closer scrutiny of watermarks. This is a rewarding task, since it often helps to position drawings chronologically or within an artist’s oeuvre. Particular attention was also devoted to provenance. On nine drawings we discovered the marks of Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726–1798), all of which had previously gone unnoticed. One of these is the above-mentioned Avercamp on which Ploos’s annotation had been hidden by the mount. This find enabled me to identify the sheet in Ploos’s sale catalogue of 3 March 1800 (Kunstboek E, no. 45).

A late seventeenth-century type of price annotation in pen and ink had previously been known only from drawings by an artist who signed as “C. dú Jardin”. In our collection we also found it on drawings by many other artists. One such example is Herman Saftleven’s Barn Interior (fig. 8). This early work (from 1630) was valued at two guilders, the highest price in the group.

One final note on provenance: among the collection of Netherlandish drawings, three more recent stamps of the museum were discovered that had previously gone unremarked and are now included in Lugt Marques as L. 6212 to 6214.

Epilogue

This project proved once again the great value of researching a collection catalogue. A wide-ranging selection of results will be shown in our exhibition Expedition Zeichnung. Niederländische Meister unter der Lupe, scheduled to open in mid-November this year. From the outset, our aim was to make the research process transparent and comprehensible: enabling viewers not just to look over the artist’s shoulder but also to follow our own thought processes. A preview was presented by Thomas Klinke’s cabinet exhibition Zeichnung im Labor: Papier trägt Kunst (Cologne, November 2023 to February 2024). This show, which focused on material aspects of drawings and the investigative methods of art technology, whetted viewers’ appetite for more stories of Netherlandish draftsmanship.

In addition to the printed exhibition catalogue, a collection catalogue will be published, most likely as a pdf. At the moment, there is still room for suggestions. Loose ends still remain – a fate shared by many collection catalogues – in the form of unclear attributions or puzzling iconography. We will present some of these cases during our in-house excursion at CODART 26 in Cologne and look forward to the stimulating discussions among colleagues to which they will doubtless give rise.

Annemarie Stefes is a freelance researcher, currently at Wallraf-Richartz-Museum & Fondation Corboud in Cologne. She has been an associate member of CODART since 2024.

[1] Hella Robels, Niederländische Zeichnungen vom 15. bis 19. Jahrhundert im Wallraf-Richartz-Museum Köln, Cologne 1983