Pieter Holsteyn II (Haarlem c.1614 – 1673 Amsterdam)

Study of an Avocet

Pen and grey ink, watercolour, brown ink framing lines, 148 x 173 mm (5.8 x 6.8 inch)

Inscribed ‘ad … 114 / No 4 #’ (red chalk, verso) and ‘VH f’ (pencil, verso)

Provenance
Private collection, The Netherlands

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Pieter Holsteyn was born in Haarlem around 1614 as the son of the artist Pieter Holsteyn the Elder (c.1580–1662) and Marritge Cornelisdr.¹ Pieter the Elder was active as a designer of cartoons for tapestries, as an engraver and as a town glazier; he was the teacher of Pieter Holsteyn the Younger and his other, younger son Cornelis Holsteyn (1618–1658), who also became an artist. While Cornelis mostly painted pastoral scenes in the Italianate manner, Pieter the Younger was almost exclusively active as a draughtsman, specialising in meticulous drawing and watercolours of animals, flowers and plants.

An album with a large group of approximately 150 drawings of birds, reptiles and other animals is preserved in the Noord-Hollands Archief in Haarlem, bequeathed in 1888 by Adriaan Justus Enschedé.² A similar representation of an avocet is part of this collection, thought to have been drawn circa 1656-1667 (fig.).³ Another version of our drawing was part of the Otto Naumann collection.⁴ The avocet could have been part of the volière belonging to Prince Maurits of Orange in The Hague, where Holsteyn studied from life. As with the sheet in Haarlem, drawings like these were probably original made in sets, contained in albums, collected by amateurs of natural history.

1. For the artist, see Theo Vignau-Wilberg, Pieter Holsteyn the younger, Haarlem 1614-1673 Amsterdam: alderhande kruypende en vliegende gedierten, Munich 2013 and Michael Bischoff, Eine Menagerie auf Papier: der niederländische Tierzeichner Pieter Holsteyn d.j. (um 1614 – 1673), exh. cat. Lemgo (Weserrenaissance-Museum Schloss Brake) 2011.
2. Many monogrammed ‘PH. Fe’, generally circa 160 x 199 mm, inv. no. 53-002970 K.
3. Watercolour, 156 x 201 mm, inv. no. 41961.
4. Watercolour, 156 x 204 mm; Sotheby’s, New York, 25 January 2007, lot 122.