Lot 101: Abraham de Verwer (before 1600-1650 Amsterdam)

A view of Vlissingen
inscribed 'Vlissingen van de Westsyde'
black chalk, pen and brown ink
6 3/8 x 11 3/4 in. (162 x 298 mm.)

London, Royal Academy, The Paul Oppé Collection, 1958, no. 433.

F.W. Robinson and S. Peck, Fresh Woods and Pastures New, Seventeenth -Century Dutch Landscape Drawings from the Peck Collection, exhib. cat., Chapel Hill, Acland Art Museum, and elsewhere, 2000-2001, under no. 37.

Anonymous sale; Puttick and Simpson, July 1913 (26s. with two other drawings).

Vlissingen (Flushing), at the mouth of the River Scheldt in Zeeland north-west of Antwerp, enjoyed great wealth in the 17th Century and was one of the main harbours for the Dutch East India Company.
Another drawing of the city was formerly in the collection of Sir Bruce Ingram (exhibited at P. & D. Colnaghi, London, 1937, no. 35), while a view of the town from the direction of Sluis, slightly to the south of the present viewpoint but of similar dimensions and inscription, is in the British Museum as part of a group of eleven views of the coast of the Southern Netherlands and France (A.M. Hind, Catalogue of Drawings by Dutch and Flemish Artists preserved in the Department of Prints and Drawings in the British Museum, London, 1931, IV, p. 89, no. 1, pl. 53).
This drawing and the group in the British Museum can be dated to circa 1637-38. The views of Vlissingen may be associated with a more developed drawing of Shipping on a calm sea, fully worked up in brown wash and dated to the 1640s, in the Peck Collection (F.W. Robinson and S. Peck, op. cit., no. 37).

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