According to Jaap Bolton, this study emerged around 1632 as a partial preparatory drawing for Abraham Bloemaert’s contemporaneous oil painting The Young Pickpocket, which today is located in a private collection in London1. The remainder of a squared grid on the obverse side of the sheet attests to this translation across media.
Moreover, the present sheet belongs to a group of drawings after which Bloemaert’s son, Frederick (ca. 1614-1690), created mirror-image etchings for his famous Tekenboek between 1650 and 1655 (Plate 126). Traces of the graphic transformation on the reverse side of our sheet point to this additional use of the drawing as a direct print model.
In the course of this project by his youngest son, Abraham Bloemaert himself prepared a second version of the motif, which is today located as no. 89 in the so-called Cambridge Album of the artist in the Fitzwilliam Museum there.
The university in Liège holds in its collection an additional, thematically-related representation of a woman sleeping on a boulder, likewise with pen and ink as well as partial wash2.
- Marcel Roethlisberger: Abraham Bloemaert and his sons, paintings and prints, Gent 1993, no. 499, p. 321, ill. 683, plate XXVII, oil on canvas, 61 x 71 cm
- Jean-Patrick Duchesne: Le patrimoine artistique de l’Université de Liège, Liège 1993, inv. no. 25113, p. 63 (ill.), 118 x 98 mm