View of Calcar on the Lower Rhine near Cleves

Aelbert Cuyp

ca. 1640–42 · Black chalk and gray wash and graphite, watercolored in green and ochre yellow, partly brushed with gum arabic; framing lines in black ink · Drawings and Prints

Belonging to a group of broad panoramas from the early 1640s, all with a fold in the middle, Cuyp must have made this drawing during a trip to the eastern Netherlands, near the German border. The town of Calcar can be seen at the right; behind it lies the Monterberg, a favorite destination for outings. Cuyp, one of the outstanding Dutch landscapists of the seventeenth century, set the view of Calcar and the surrounding flat landscape against a vigorously drawn foreground, a feature of many of his painted compositions. The distant view in the drawing was used by him for a painting now at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. The drawing belongs to a group of more than twenty sheets and eight paintings from the collection of Frits Markus, a Dutchman who lived in New York, which was bequeathed to the museum by his wife Rita.

Artist

Aelbert Cuyp

Date

ca. 1640–42

Medium

Black chalk and gray wash and graphite, watercolored in green and ochre yellow, partly brushed with gum arabic; framing lines in black ink

Department

Drawings and Prints

Credit line

From the Collection of Rita and Frits Markus, Bequest of Rita Markus, 2005