Description:

inscribed (verso): du jardin
brown wash over black chalk
330 x 259 mm

Provenance:

Dr Willem van Dalfsen (1909–1978), Arnhem and Blokzijl [mark not in Lugt]
Anthony Powell (1835–2021), London

Note:

Until recently, the drawings of Guilliam du Gardijn were often attributed to the similarly named and more historically established figure of Karel Dujardin (1626–1678), owing to misinterpreted inscriptions, or given to his contemporaries such as Cornelis van Poelenburgh (1594–1667), Bartholomeus Breenbergh (1598–1657), and Herman van Swanevelt (1603–1652) due to stylistic affinities. Recent research, however, has helped to clarify the known facts of the artist’s life and to re-establish the essential characteristics of his oeuvre and distinctive draughtsmanship. The present sheet, a sun-drenched landscape with Italianate ruins, has recently been identified by Dr Annemarie Stefes and added to the artist’s small corpus of autograph drawings. It belongs to a group of wash landscapes inspired by the artist’s presumed stay in Rome and may depict a ruin from the Baths of Caracalla, a picturesque Roman motif that du Gardijn represented on several occasions.

Born in Cologne, du Gardijn moved to Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century, where he married twice and became the teacher of Johann Heinrich Roos (1631–1685). Despite his Dutch base, his drawings consist predominantly of views of Rome and its surroundings. The influence of his Dutch Italianate contemporaries, together with his use of Italian paper, suggests that many of these sheets were executed from life and that he travelled to the Eternal City at some point during the 1620s or 1630s. As du Gardijn is known to have married in 1618 and again in 1639, it has been suggested that he undertook the journey south following the death of his first wife. No documentary evidence for this journey survives, however, beyond the testimony of his drawings.

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