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Lot Essay
This striking example of Koninck’s humorous drawings exaggerates its subject’s character while stopping just short of caricature. The inscription suggests that it was drawn, if not from life then from memory shortly after the artist had spotted this monk in the street. It is tempting to read the fragmentary word 'bak[...]' as 'bakkerij', because the plump monk carries a couple of large loaves of bread under his left arm and two bulging saddle-bags of provisions over his shoulders. Sumowski suggested a date of around 1660, on the basis of the drawing’s stylistic similarities with Koninck’s drawing of Merry Peasants in a Tavern (Prentenkabinet, Rijksuniversiteit Leiden; Sumowski, op. cit., no. 1325). A similar spirited observation of everyday life enlivens other drawings by the artist, such as the Three nuns in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem (Sumowski, op. cit., no. 1338), Three orientals standing in the Albertina, Vienna (Sumowski, op. cit., no. 1373x), and the sheet of A woman nursing a child in the Hermitage, Saint Petersburg (Sumowski , op. cit., no. 1463x).
The drawing was formerly in the collection of Charles Howard Hodges (1764-1837), who was one of the most important portraitists of his time in Holland. Born in Portsmouth, he later moved with his family first to The Hague and then to Amsterdam in 1788, where he studied with Johann Friedrich August Tischbein (1750-1812) and later became a celebrated painter of the Dutch social elite. It may have also previously been in the collection of the renowned Dutch linguist Lambert Ten Kate (1674-1731), whose inventory records 'Een Beddel-Monnik [a mendicant friar]' given to van den Eeckhout (album Q, no. 32; see Sumowski, op. cit., and J.G. van Gelder, 'Lambert ten Kate als Kunstverzamelaar', Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek, XXI, 1970, p. 184).
The drawing was formerly in the collection of Charles Howard Hodges (1764-1837), who was one of the most important portraitists of his time in Holland. Born in Portsmouth, he later moved with his family first to The Hague and then to Amsterdam in 1788, where he studied with Johann Friedrich August Tischbein (1750-1812) and later became a celebrated painter of the Dutch social elite. It may have also previously been in the collection of the renowned Dutch linguist Lambert Ten Kate (1674-1731), whose inventory records 'Een Beddel-Monnik [a mendicant friar]' given to van den Eeckhout (album Q, no. 32; see Sumowski, op. cit., and J.G. van Gelder, 'Lambert ten Kate als Kunstverzamelaar', Nederlands kunsthistorisch jaarboek, XXI, 1970, p. 184).