A popular and influential teacher, the Utrecht painter Abraham Bloemaert (c. 1565–1651) was the son of a sculptor and the father of four painters and printmakers.(1) According to van Mander, Bloemaert claimed that he had suffered as a boy under the direction of incompetent masters, an experience he often recalled to his own students.(2) Along with Paulus Moreelse, he established an academy of art in his native city, contributing greatly to its reputation as one of the most thriving artistic centers of the Dutch seventeenth century. His pupils included such major painters as Gerrit von Honthorst and Hendrick ter Brugghen. This may account in part for the importance teaching played in his own career. Drawing played a major role in Abraham’s busy studio, not only as preparation for paintings or prints but also as a teaching aid, a necessity in a large workshop where students learned to emulate the master’s style by copying his work. In 1650, working in collaboration with his son Frederick, Bloemaert published the Tekenboek, a collection of Abraham’s designs intended for students to copy as they learned to draw.(3)

Bloemaert disseminated his style not only through his many pupils but also via the hundreds of prints for which he provided designs.(4) The present landscape was reproduced in an etching by his son Frederick (c. 1616–1690), as part of a series of fifteen large landscapes.(5) By far the most prolific of the printmakers reproducing Abraham’s work, Frederick was particularly successful at evoking his father’s light, calligraphic touch of the pen with etched lines, which he sometimes supplemented with chiaroscuro woodcut. As is the case with other drawings Frederick etched for this series, including examples in Washington, London, and Windsor, the Crocker drawing is incised with a stylus for transfer.(6)

Long regarded as the work of Abraham Bloemaert himself, these modelli have more recently been attributed to Frederick.(7) The younger artist drew upon the vast supply of his father’s sketches, combining or adapting them using Abraham’s style of draughtsmanship, which he would have learned thoroughly. A black chalk sketch by Abraham now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, provided the panoramic landscape of hills or dunes in the background of the present drawing.(8) Abraham made hundreds of these sketches of landscape motifs, often from life, as described by van Mander.(9) Frederick apparently adapted motifs from Abraham’s sketches for other prints in the series, and his tidier style of draughtsmanship is demonstrated by a comparison of a drawing in Windsor with the looser, more painterly quality of Abraham’s original sketch.(10)

Despite his close collaboration with his father on such projects as the Tekenboek, Frederick remains a shadowy figure, and little is known about his life or artistic style: his many prints are undated, he left no signed drawings, and he appears to have devoted his entire career to reproducing or elaborating upon his father’s designs.(11) Drawings have in the past been tentatively assigned to Frederick, such as the modelli for the Tekenboek.(12) Like the engravers’ models for the Large Landscape series, these drawings both copy and elaborate upon Abraham’s motifs. With the publication of Jaap Bolten’s catalogue raisonné of Abraham’s drawings and the re-examination of the models for Frederick’s prints, the son’s role in his father’s workshop is likely to come into clearer focus.

Stacey Sell, in William Breazeale, with Cara Denison, Stacey Sell, and Freyda Spira, A Pioneering Collection: Master Drawings from the Crocker Art Museum, exh. cat. Sacramento and tour, 2010