nj A Young Peasant Holding
ajar
118 A Peasant Woman Carrying
ajug
Pen and brown ink and black chalk; H: 10.7 cm (4^3 /i6 in.);
W: 5.8cm(2^5 /i6Ín.)
86.GG.477, 86.00.478
MARKS AND INSCRIPTIONS: None.
PROVENANCE: Robert P. Roupell, London; Tony Straus-
Negbaur (sale, P. Cassirer and H. Helbing, Berlin, No-
vember 25, 1930, lots 25-26); private collection (sale,
Christie's, London, December 12, 1978, lot 232); private
collection; art market, London.
EXHIBITIONS: An Exhibition of Drawings and Watercolours
from the loth to the 2oth Century, Christian M. Nebehay,
Vienna, January 1986 , no. i.
BIBLIOGRAPHY: None.
THE ATTRIBUTION OF THIS PAIR OF DRAWINGS TO SE-
bald Beham was advanced by J. Rosenberg (in Cassirer
and Helbing 1930) and is confirmed by a comparison
with a pen-and-ink study of a peasant stealing cheese in
the National Gallery of Art (Rosenwald Collection, inv.
1943.3.1040), which is dated 1520, the approximate date
of the present sheets. The Museum's drawings are close
to peasants appearing in prints by Beham but were not
used as models. In particular the peasant man approxi-
mates a similar figure in the woodcut Peasant Couple with
Jugs anda Goose (B. 142-143, v. 15,8), which illustrates Be
ham's Kunst unà Lerebuechlin (1546), while the woman is
reminiscent of a tightly kerchiefed crone carrying a milk
jug in the fourth of the six-block broadsheet The Country
Fair at Mogeldorf* Instead of having been made for a spe-
cific print, this pair, which originally could have be-
longed to a single sheet, might once have formed part of
a fund of stock types which Beham employed in differ-
ing combinations and poses in his numerous engravings
and woodcuts of peasants.i. M. Geisberg, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut: 1500-1550,
rev. and ed. W. L. Strauss (New York, 1974), vol. i, no. 14.270 CENTRAL EUROPEAN SCHOOL • S. BEHAM