black chalk
24.2 x 35.7 cm

Provenance:
With C.G. Boerner, Düsseldorf, 1962, Neue Lagerliste Nr. 34. Handzeichnungen Alter und Neuerer
Meister, no. 188.
Antiquariatsmesse Stuttgart, January-February 1964, no. 35;
C.G. Boerner Düsseldorf, Ausgewählte Handzeichnungen aus Vier Jahrhunderten. I. Ältere Meister,
no. 137, ill.
Anonymous sale; Galerie Fischer, Luzern, 20 November 1979, lot 297.
Kurt Meissner (1909-2004), Zürich.
Anonymous sale; Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 16 November 2005, lot 111.

Literature:
W. Adler, Jan Wildens. Der Landschaftsmitarbeiter des Rubens, Fridingen, 1980, no. Z 27, fig. 198.

Jan Wildens was born in Antwerp in circa 1585 and he was admitted as a Master in the Guild of
Saint Luke in 1604. [1] Some ten years later, in 1613, Wildens travelled to Italy where he stayed until
1616. This Italian sojourn had a profound influence on his work; it was there that he was introduced
to the work of Paul Bril (1553/1554-1626), whose landscapes played a key role in shaping Wildens’
own approach to landscape painting and drawing. His success as a landscape artist was such, that
Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) collaborated with Wildens from 1616-1620. Due to Rubens’ increased
production of paintings at that time, the artist’s need for collaborators that could provide landscapes
in his many allegorical, historical and mythological paintings grew and Wildens (amongst other
artists) is known to have supplied a number of landscapes in Rubens’s pictures.

Today, only about 40 drawings by the Wildens are known. [2] Wildens’ drawing style changed
considerably during his career; while his early drawings show the influence of artists such as Joos de
Momper (1564-1635) and Paul Bril, his later drawings are much more freely drawn. The present sheet
is such a drawing and is one of his most virtuoso drawings that have survived. With a particularly
rapid use of the chalk, Wildens has depicted an animated landscape with a path and a stream in
the foreground and in the far background a village. The drawing is very close in terms of style and
technique to another landscape drawing, signed and dated 1637, showing a path through a hilly
landscape, now in the Prentenkabinet, Universiteit Leiden. [3] It seems plausible that the present
drawing was executed in the same year, and perhaps even during the same trip as the drawing in
Leiden, and that they show landscapes in close proximity to each other.

1 W. Adler, op. cit., p. 68.
2 Ibid., nos. Z1-42.
3 Ibid., no. Z26, fig. 197; inv. PK-T-AW-1127