Wenceslaus Hollar

(Prague 1607-1677 London)

View of Strasbourg from the north east

Footnotes

Provenance
Collection of Henry R.M. Howard (L. 1318)
Collection of Francis Springell, before 1963
His sale, Sotheby's, London, 30 June 1986, lot 5
Collection of Dr Alfred Scharf (1900-1965) and thence by descent to the present owner

Exhibited
Manchester, Manchester City Art Gallery, Wenceslaus Hollar, 1607-1677: drawings, paintings, and etchings under revision, 25 September - 17 November 1963, cat. no. D.8

Literature
F. Sprinzels, Hollar, Vienna, 1938, p. 74, cat. no. 117 (with measurements reversed), ill., pl. 55, fig. 280
V. Denkstein, Hollar drawings, London, 1979, p.33, fig. 13
A. Volrábová, Wenceslaus Hollar (1606-1677) Drawings, A Catalogue Raisonné, Prague, 2017, under A.III. Appendix - Missing Drawings, p. 431, no. A.III/13

Early in his professional life Hollar left his home city of Prague for Germany, the first of several countries he was to visit before finally settling in London as a result of meeting the Earl of Arundel during his travels. After two years in Stuttgart he arrived in Strasbourg in 1629 where he worked for Jacob van der Heyden's publishing house. The year he spent in Strasbourg was particularly productive and he made a number of landscape studies in and around the city. The present work is thought to be the earliest of his panoramic views and is very unusual in not having been developed into a more finished drawing or a recorded print.

There is a remarkable fluency in the way Hollar has sketched the walled city - an avenue of trees, for instance, is described by a continuous looping pen line that indicates a sketch made on the spot and at speed. It also shows he was already remarkably assured in his ability to create a sense of recession in such a small and economic drawing. Close inspection shows a series of very faint graphite lines radiating out from a pin hole in the sky to the left of the spire of the cathedral church of Notre Dame, which Hollar would have used as a guide to the perspective.

Hollar was from a well-to-do Prague family and his father was knighted by Emperor Rudolf II. One might speculate that as the son of a court official he may have been familiar with paintings in Rudolph's remarkable collection, such as those by the Brueghels, Paul Brill, Adam Elsheimer, Joris and Jacob Hoefnagel and Roelant Savery. His early prints show the influence of the court engraver Aegidius Sadeler as well as Durer's landscape etchings.

One of the 20th century owners of this drawing, Henry Howard, was a print collector whose particular area of interest was Hollar, and he assisted the Royal Librarian of the day, Sir Owen Morshead, in cataloguing the Hollar drawings at Windsor. Dr. Alfred Scharf was to acquire the drawing at a later point; he was an art historian, collector and art dealer who emigrated from Berlin to London in 1933, and he remained there for the rest of his life.