Entry by
William W. Robinson,
completed May 13, 2019:
On May 1, 1664, Elsje Christiaens, an 18-year-old woman from Jutland, was publicly executed in Dam Square in Amsterdam for the murder of her landlady. Following her death by strangulation, Christiaens’s body and the ax she used in the crime were hung on a gallows on the Volewijck, a spit of land on the north bank of the IJ River, where the city authorities displayed the remains of executed malefactors as a warning to fellow citizens. Rembrandt made two drawings of Christiaens’s gibbeted corpse, one in which he depicted it frontally, and one in which he sketched it from the side. As Wilhelm R. Valentiner concluded in 1931, the Harvard drawing is a copy after Rembrandt’s frontal view by an unidentified pupil or close follower of the master. The tentative attribution of the Harvard copy to Nicolaes Maes cannot be sustained. Maes was Rembrandt’s pupil around 1650, while the copy must date from 1664 or later, and the technique of the copy shows no compelling similarity to the handling of Maes’s autograph drawings. Another copy, or later imitation, after the same Rembrandt original is in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, in Munich.
The Harvard sheet and Rembrandt’s sketch of Elsje Christiaens from the side belonged to the same three French private collections (M. de Bourguignon de Fabregoules, Charles-Joseph-Barthélémy Giraud, and Prosper Flury-Hérard) during much of the 19th century.
