Jacob Cats - [Landscape with harvesting scene]

Drawing shows landscape and village at harvest time with a church in the distance. Several drawings of landscapes by Jacob Cats that relate to this sheet reproduce the same church tower. One, in the British Museum, London (Inv. no. 1910-2-12-129 13; Gernsheim Corpus no.106 780), shows the harvested field from another angle farther to the right. The other, in Leiden (Inv. no. 1443; Gernsheim Corpus no. 44 692), appears to reproduce the same church tower, on a hill, from the opposite direction.
Title, date, subject, and physical description by Diane de Grazia, 2014.
Title in P&P Bradley Collection inventory card: Harvesting. Alternate title from "drawings list" in Bradley Collection accessions file.
Inscriptions: Verso, lower left in brown ink in the artist's hand: "J: Cats inv et feci/ No. 153" and in black chalk below: "1791." Lower toward left in graphite: "589" and Bradley stamp lower right. Upper left: "136" and something under hinge.
George Lothrop Bradley Collection. (Lugt suppl. 288b)
Bequest; George Lothrop Bradley; 1919.
Jacob Cats was an amateur Dutch draftsman whose main occupation was that of a wallpaper painter. His drawn oeuvre consists mostly of landscapes with small figures and animals in everyday activities. Often, as here, the foreground is emphasized in shadow to distinguish it from the farther reaches of the flat Dutch landscape background. The signature, date (1791), and numbering (153) on the verso are in the artist's hand. As Jane Shoaf Turner has shown, Jacob Cats numbered his drawings in the chronological sequence in which he made them. (See "Jacob Cats and the Identification of a 'Pseudo-Goll van Franckenstein' Numbering System," Master Drawings, vol. 28, no. 3 [Autumn, 1990)] pp. 323-331.) The inscription on the present sheet accords with Cats's handwriting, authenticating this sheet as a work by the artist. There appear to be different numbering systems, and more drawings by the artist are unnumbered than numbered. Shoaf suggests that the numbered sheets were possibly placed in books from which potential clients could choose to order more finished works.