The angel warning Joseph to flee to Egypt

Apart from a handful of early drawings that show the influence of Pieter Quast, drawings by Constantijn Daniel van Renesse are infused with the style of Rembrandt. While the artist was trained by him from the mid-1640s to the mid-1650s, Sumowski has argued that he was not a regular student, but instead trained ‘in various courses with a fixed time span’ with the great master (op. cit., p. 4813). Sumowski based the attribution of this sheet on a comparison with a drawing showing Daniel in the lions' den in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (inv. 200; see ibid., no. 2145, ill.), noting that ‘the figure of the angel was certainly drawn by the same author’. He furthermore observes that the technique of the drawing is characteristic and suggests a date of ca. 1649/1650.