Signed and dated Dl DuPr. delt 1796. nat Schildery van de Oude Hackert. (verso)
Pencil, pen and ink and watercolour, within a delineated border, 530 x 461 mm. (20 7/8 x 18 1/8 in.)
SOLD TO A PRIVATE COLLECTOR
Dupr worked as a landscapist, etcher and draughtsman. He trained with the decorative painter Johannes van Dregt and from 1767 with Jurriaen Andriessen at the Amsterdam Drawing Academy. He travelled to Switzerland and the Rhine, on his latter visit he was accompanied by his friends Jan Ekels the Younger and Jacques Kuyer. Dupr lived in Italy from 1785-90 on a grant from the Holland Scientific Society of Haarlem, and made views of the Roman campagna and cities. Afterwards he settled in Amsterdam.
Watercolours by Dupr are very rare, however a few are known in the Rijksmuseum1, he usually works in brown monochrome2. Brown monochrome is used in this drawing, however Dupr has extensively used watercolour in this drawing, and he used it throughout the sheet. This drawing was executed when he came back from Holland, and as per the inscription is based on a painting by Hackert3. The watercolour is in an excellent condition, is very fresh and is an especially large watercolour for the artist.
1.J.W. Niemeijer, Eighteenth-Century Watercolours from the Rijksmuseum Print room, Amsterdam, Zwolle, 1993, nos.19 and 20, and Crispian Riley-Smith, Master Drawings, 2003, cat. no 23.
2.London, Crispian Riley-Smith, Master Drawings, 2002, cat.no.11, now private collection, New York.
3.Dr Claudia Nordhoff has commented on the drawing: Dupr refers in his signature not Jakob Philipp Hackert but the older (de Oude) Jan Hackaert (1628-after 1685), one of the so-called Italianate painters born in Amsterdam. The animals and figures in the foreground, but also the composition of the landscape with its high rocks and the dense trees is not typical for Jakob Philipp Hackert at all but can be found for example in an oil-painting by Jan Hackaert sold with Sotheby's Amsterdam the 5th November 2002, lot 294, [see figure 1] where one can also observe the same manner to draw a white line at the border of the trees as in the right middle ground of your painting.
