Master Drawings, Winter 2022
Jane Shoaf Turner, Editor of Master Drawings and the Emerita Head of the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, along with Maud van Suylen, curator of drawings at the museum, present a spellbinding essay in the newest issue of Master Drawings (Vol 60, Issue 4). Together they brilliantly examine some 125 Dutch works on paper, many with an interrelated set of mysterious inscriptions–some including Greek letter combinations–collector’s marks initially documented by Frits Lugt.
In the early 1990s Turner initially proposed the unidentified collector of these drawings to be Dr. Johannes Claesz. Furnerius, because many of the sheets were drawn by his son, landscape draftsman Abraham Furnerius. The present study thoroughly reevaluates this assertion by documenting the exponential increase in our knowledge of the Furnerius family and works associated with them over the last thirty years. With the careful analysis of signatures and inscriptions, follow the authors’ journey as they reassemble this vast trove of drawings (and continue to do so in an article supplement on our website).
Collectors and their collections are also the focus of three other fascinating articles in this last issue of our Jubilee year. Jennifer Tonkovich writes of the intriguing eighteenth-century Dutchman, Jan van Rymsdyk, and his collection of equally enigmatic, coded drawings. A rare Swedish collection of drawings assembled by Major Gen. Carl Hård af Segerstad, which includes sheets by many Italian masters, is carefully documented by author Per Widén. Rounding out the issue is a highly personal examination: nineteenth-century French collector Émile Calando and the phenomenal works he owned are carefully catalogued by his descendant Denis Calando, revealing why his ancestor was a modest collector with a mighty collection.
