A seated African holding a parasol

This powerful and confident figure study is a very unusual instance of van den Eeckhout using black and white chalk on blue paper, a technique which is found much more in the work of his contemporaries such as Cornelis Bega (circa 1631-1664), Govert Flinck (1615-1660) and Jacob Backer (1609-1651). Indeed, for much of its history this drawing has been thought to be by Backer, and it was under that attribution that it was purchased by I.Q. van Regteren Altena in 1929; but Sumowski noted that it is in fact a preparatory study for the figure of an African riding a camel, in the right background of van den Eeckhout’s painting Eliezer and Rebecca at the Well, dated by Sumowski to the early 1660s (Národní Galerie, Prague; Sumowski 1980, op. cit., no. 477, illustrated p. 840; Fig. 1), thereby firmly settling the question of attribution. It is one of only two drawings in this technique that can be directly connected to a painting by the artist: the other, in the Yale University Art Museum (Sumowski 1980, op. cit., no. 615), is a study for the figure of a servant in Elisha and the Shunammite Woman, dated 1649, in the Muzeum Narodowe, Warsaw. It was on the basis of these two firm connections that Sumowski was able to reattribute to van den Eeckhout two other drawings executed in the same technique: the Seated man with cloak, hat and gloves in the Prentenkabinet of the Rijksuniversiteit, Leiden (Sumowski 1980, op. cit., no. 730) and the Seated woman seen from behind (Sumowski 1980, op. cit., no. 731), which is also in the van Regteren Altena collection.