JOACHIM ANTHONISZ. WTEWAEL
125 Young Woman Assisted
by a Gentleman
Pen and black ink, gray wash, and white gouache height
ening; H: 19. 2 cm (y^5 /8 in.); W: 25 cm (9I3/i6 in.)
85.GA.230
MARKS AND INSCRIPTIONS: At bottom left corner,
signed Jo Wte / Wael /p in gray ink.
PROVENANCE: Private collection, Stockholm; art mar
ket, California.
EXHIBITIONS: None.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: W. Bernt, Die niederldndischen Zeichne
des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1958), vol. 2, no. 699; E.
McGrath, "A Netherlandish History by Joachim Wte
wael," Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 3
(1975), pp. 182, 184, 200-202; F. W. Robinson, Seven
teenth Century Dutch Drawings from American Collections
exh. cat., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.,
and other institutions, 1977, p. 12, under no. 9; K. G.
Boon, Netherlandish Drawings of the Fifteenth and Sixteent
Centuries in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam (Amsterdam,
1978), vol. i, p. 186.
- r - 9 - , h
THIS IS ONE OF AT LEAST THIRTEEN DRAWINGS MADE
by Wtewael for a series in which incidents from the
Eighty Years War of Dutch independence are repre-
sented through allegorical means (McGrath 1975). In this
scene Prince Maurice of Orange is shown lifting up Bel-
gica, who turns to him hopefully. The prince also directs
her attention to the barge in the background, the then
well-known "turf ship of Breda" on which his troops
were brought secretly into that town in 1590 to capture
it from the Spaniards (McGrath 1975, pp. 200-201).
Several of the allegories in this series are known in
more than one version, and the principal ones are signed
and numbered. Others are of lesser quality and may well
be studio repetitions, though there seem to be autograph
replicas as well. The purpose for which they were made
is elusive, even though most scholars have seen them as
designs for an unexecuted print series. A. Lowenthal be-
lieves that they were more probably made as indepen-
dent finished drawings, however, especially as the direc-
tion of gesture and action in drawings such as this one
would be rendered less satisfactory if reversed in the pro-
cess of making prints.^1 The allegories all have been dated
by McGrath (1975) to the years just after the signing of a
truce with Spain in 1609 and by Lowenthal to the early
I620S.^2
A copy of this drawing was sold at Christie's, Lon-
don, on July 8, 1975 , as lot 200 and was in the possession
of Jean Willems in Brussels in 1983. It appears clearly to
be a workshop repetition.^3- Conversation with the author, Malibu, 1985.
- A. W. Lowenthal, Joachim Wtewael and Dutch Mannerism
(Doornspijk, 1986), p. 34, n. 64. - J. Willems, Master Drawings from the i6th to the early 20th cen-
tury (Brussels, 1983), no. 8.
278 DUTCH SCHOOL • WTEWAEL