Art reviews: Dürer to Van Dyck: Drawings from Chatsworth House | Through Line

View on the Amstel the road on the Amsteldijk leading to Trompenburg, by Rembrandt van Rijn | The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement

Dürer to Van Dyck: Drawings from Chatsworth House, Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh ★★★★★

Through Line, City Art Centre, Edinburgh ★★★★

When Rembrandt felt like taking a walk he would often go out of Amsterdam along the river Amstel and its associated rivers and canals. We know this of course, not from any diary or document, but from the drawings he made along the way. A pair currently on view in the National Galleries of Scotland’s exhibition, Dürer to Van Dyck: Drawings from Chatsworth House, is particularly telling. They are of the same view from an embankment on the Amstel called the Amsteldijk. One drawing is summary, just some trees, the wide path and a house, certainly done as Rembrandt paused on his walk. The second drawing is more complete. There is a sailing boat and a distant windmill and the river, with reeds along its edge, is clearly indicated, No doubt these details were added from memory as Rembrandt developed his sketch back in the studio.

Two other drawings perhaps record similar walks. One of them is in quick cross hatching as though done rapidly on the spot. The other is a little more worked up, but it too was no doubt begun when he paused on a walk. A third landscape is a long, panoramic view from the Diemerdijk. Away from city taxes the beer was cheaper, so perhaps he sat a little longer to make this lovely wide view.

Two other drawings give rather different, but equally intimate glimpses into Rembrandt’s life. One of Judas receiving his 30 pieces of silver was evidently done by a pupil. Rembrandt has corrected it with a few deft touches and so for moment we are beside his student. The implications of a drawing of the gates of the city of Utrecht are more personal. Utrecht is 45 miles from Amsterdam. Rembrandt didn’t travel often, but he seems to have made the journey to accompany his partner, Hendrickje Stoffels, to a baptism. Partner is an unremarkable term now, but then it indicated a scandalous situation, particularly for a woman. Rembrandt’s support for Stoffels was essential, and so he went with her. Drawing really can be a very personal thing.

Installation view of Dürer to Van Dyck: Drawings from Chatsworth House | Neil Hanna

There are several other drawings by Rembrandt here, including a vivid depiction of the actor Bartelsz Ruyters in costume on stage, but there is much more, too, for at Chatsworth the Duke of Devonshire holds one of the world’s great collections of drawings. Its core is the collection of Nicolaes Flinck, acquired after his death in 1723. Flink’s father, Govert Flinck, was an artist closely associated with Rembrandt, so perhaps these particular drawings have only changed hands twice in nearly 400 years.

Some drawings are by other great names, others are less familiar, but many, like a drawing of a young man by Hans Holbein, are quite breathtaking. Holbein’s highly-finished drawings of Tudor men and women are familiar, but this one, done just before Holbein went to England for the first time in 1526, is very different. At once precise and free, the young man has a vivid presence as he gazes intently away from us. Technically, too, it is complex and to help explain such techniques displays of drawing materials are a useful feature of this show.

Another star here is a really beautiful Madonna and child by Dürer, but beside it is a remarkable drawing by a less familiar artist, Jan Gossaert, called Mabuse. Done in about 1520 in black chalk on grey paper and heightened with white, it shows Adam and Eve in a close embrace, both with a hand on the fatal apple. Standing, Eve seems calm, but Adam’s face and body language are a study in terrified apprehension as he realises what he has done. The catalogue aptly says this is “quite simply one the great drawings of the Northern Renaissance.”

As Rembrandt’s landscapes from his country walks demonstrate, before photography, drawing was the medium of record, and in 1636 Wenceslaus Hollar accompanied the Earl of Arundel on a diplomatic mission into northern Europe to document his travels. He did this in minutely detailed drawings of places along the great rivers that were the highways of the time. In one shocking drawing, however, he also recorded the public execution at Linz of the leaders of a farmers’ rebellion. The detail is so minute it is hard to read, but it seems that, watched by crowds on the streets, at the windows and on the rooftops, the rebellious farmers are being dismembered alive.

A drawing by Roelandt Savery of a partly ruined house is as minutely observed, but supremely delicate in execution. It is joined here, too, by two equally lovely drawings by the artist from the NGS’s own collection, also of old houses. The three drawings, once in the same collection, are reunited here for the first time in 300 years. All are exquisite in their delicacy and detail. Roman ruins were Sebastian Vrancx’s subject when he set out to record the monuments ancient Rome, while Pieter Soutman drew Leonardo’s Last Supper in preparation for an engraving.

Rubens and Van Dyck are two great draughtsmen who feature prominently here. Van Dyck had been in Rubens’ studio and an explosive drawing of a fox and wolf hunt was actually copied by Van Dyck from a painting by Rubens. Their drawing styles are very similar and both show all the sweep and grandeur of the baroque. Even so, along within the grand gestures, they kept the fidelity to something actually seen, which is the hallmark of Northern art and a superb head of a horse and a study of cows by Van Dyck are as keenly observed as they are lively.

This veracity was essential to Van Dyck’s success as a portrait artist and we see that here in the drawings of his fellow Flemish artists, made for a set of portrait etchings. Van Dyck was also a pioneer of English landscape painting. A watercolour of trees by a road looks forward to Constable. Another outstanding landscape study here of a tree covered in brambles is, however, by Rubens. For all the Baroque energy of a sheet of studies from a Roman head, for instance, for Rubens too his feeling for the real and tangible underlay everything he did, and in a beautiful drawing of a woman churning butter his innate sympathy gives grandeur to a humble subject. Altogether this is a magnificent display of drawings by some of the greatest masters of the art.

Tangle, by Susan Mowatt | © the artist

As drawing is line, it is a nice coincidence that the latest show at the Edinburgh City At Centre, Through Line, is dedicated to lines in contemporary Scottish art.

Taken from the city’s own collections as well as drawing on loans, it includes, for instance, a single line drawn into extraordinary meshes of drawing by David Connearn, woven lines of multi-coloured fabric by Susan Mowatt, lines of recycled cans rendered into minutely detailed, sparkling jewellery by Andrew Lamb, lines of poetry by Ian Hamilton Finlay and much else, all set out with elegant economy in a luminous show.

Dürer to Van Dyck until 23 February 2025; Through Line until 2 March 2025