Description:

inscribed lower right: BBf.
brush and grey wash over traces of black chalk
350 x 250 mm

Note:

This drawing can be dated to the second half of the 1640s when Worst was active in Rome. The view records the surviving ruins of Septimius Severus’s additions to the Imperial palace complex on the Palatine Hill. Drawn from the roadway below the palace, the view captured here still greets visitors to the Circus Maximus today.

Dr Annemarie Stefes first recognised Jan Worst’s hand in this drawing (correspondence dated November 2023). She observed a number of idiosyncrasies associated with Worst’s technique, such as the linear treatment of foliage with the brush, as opposed to the use of the pen or under-drawing in chalk, as seen in the drawings of Adam Pijnacker (1622-1673) and Willem Romeyn (c. 1624-1694). She compared the treatment of structures with those in a double-sided drawing at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. The composition can also be compared more generally to another drawing by Worst at the Teylers Museum, Haarlem. Dr Peter Schatborn, author of Worst’s first catalogue raisonné, has since endorsed Stefes’ attribution to Worst (correspondence dated November 2023).

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