INTRODUCTION Burchard Grossmann the Younger holds a small but honourable place in Rembrandt’s biography as the owner of an album amicorum, or friendship book, in which the artist drew a portrait of an old man that he signed on the facing recto page with the year 1634 (figs. 1, 10).¹ For all the familiarity of the drawing, scholarship has done little to clarify its background. Otto Benesch, writing close to sixty years ago, found himself hard put to explain what could have brought Rembrandt and Grossmann together.² So far as I can tell, only Ben Broos and Gary Schwartz broached the subject to any extent between Benesch and the writing of the present contribution; and despite the efforts of the latter in particular, much remains obscure.³ Indeed, we shall see that closer consideration of Rembrandt’s part in the encounter only deepens the mystery. A chance discovery unrelated to the artist, however, has provided an occasion to find out more about Grossmann – and in so doing, reveal not only a figure of interest in himself but also what could look like the missing link behind the most treasured item in his book.⁴

Grossmann in fact kept two friendship books; one, started in 1624, stayed mostly with him at his home in Jena or on short trips nearby, while the other, begun in 1629, accompanied him on foreign travels.⁵ He clearly returned often to both albums as a source of recollection, annotating their pages with information about those who signed them – death dates mostly, but also the dates of events like academic degrees.⁶ Since 1732, the two albums have formed part of a convoluut, or collective volume, assembled by a functionary at the court of Gera named Paul Andreas Hemmann; in 1896 they entered the impressive collection of alba amicorum at the Royal Library of The Hague.⁷ Rembrandt’s drawing belongs to the second album; obviously, the library purchased the convoluut precisely for the purpose of obtaining it. Much of our most important information about Grossmann comes from his albums; but a brief account of his life included in the announcement of his funeral by Johannes Zeisold, a professor at Jena and rector of the university at the time of Grossmann’s death, provides some essential framework against which to place the albums’ contents, and a handful of other scattered documents add further elements to the picture.⁸   GROSSMANN’S LIFE Burchard Grossmann the Younger came from Weimar, in Thuringia.⁹ His father, a man of wealth and culture, held a court position there from 1603 until 1616, when he became ducal Amtschösser, or tax assessor, in Jena.¹⁰ If art historians know the son, historians of music know the father.¹¹ In 1616, the latter experienced a ‘miraculous rescue’ from an unstated but obviously grave calamity; as a sign of thanks, he commissioned no fewer than sixteen settings of Psalm 116 from some of the most distinguished composers in Germany, including Heinrich Schütz, Johann Hermann Schein, and Michael Praetorius.¹² The collection, published in 1623 and titled Angst der Hellen und Friede der Seelen, ranks among the most celebrated documents of German sacred music in the early seventeenth century. Zeisold gives the younger Grossmann’s date of birth as 3 October 1605.¹³  The parents had no other children together.¹⁴ Early enrolments at the universities of Leipzig and Jena – the former in summer semester 1612, the latter two summers later – testify to efforts by his father to secure the son’s future.¹⁵ Burchard’s actual schooling took place in Weimar, Jena, and, from 1622 to 1623, at the Gymnasium Ruthenicum in Gera.¹⁶ In the summer semester of 1624, some months short of his eighteenth birthday, he took the oath that formally admitted him to studies at Leipzig.¹⁷ Before Grossmann’s departure from Jena in May 1624, his former tutor Adrian Beyer published a farewell poem, and not a few professors entered inscriptions in his newly initiated album amicorum – a sign, very likely, that he had spent a semester or two of study at Jena before his move.¹⁸ Grossmann’s stay in Leipzig – which also included a brief visit to Dresden – lasted until January 1625.¹⁹ He remained in Jena the next four years, continuing, according to Zeisold, his studies ‘cum primis Politica’.²⁰ In the spring of 1629, he undertook the first of what would ultimately become three voyages abroad; he obviously began his second album with this journey in mind. His travels over the next twelve months would take him to the northern Netherlands, then to Nuremberg and the neighbouring university town of Altdorf, where he matriculated on 6 April 1630.²¹ It would seem, however, that Grossmann never completed his studies, but turned instead to military service – to all indications a not uncommon move at the time.²² If inscriptions in his albums before 1630 typically precede his name with adjectives like ‘politissimus’, ‘literatissimus’, or ‘wohlgelahrt’, from early that year and increasingly thereafter we also find the attribute ‘mannhaft’.²³ Entries from October 1630 and later describe him as an officer, sometimes more specifically as a ‘Fendrich’, or standard bearer.²⁴ From this point on, not a few writers pay tribute to both sides of his accomplishments with pairings like ‘Artis et Martis cultori’, ‘rei literariae ac militaris’, ‘Tum Palladis tum Bellonae castra’, or, most fulsomely, ‘variae, et exquisitae eruditionis, ut et militaris scientiae, & experientiae’.²⁵ After his return from Nuremberg and Altdorf, Grossmann remained in Jena for another four years.²⁶ In the spring of 1634 he embarked on his second journey – the one that led to Rembrandt’s drawing. This lasted six months, from May to November; we can identify the principal destinations as Amsterdam, The Hague, Frankfurt am Main, and, perhaps, Hamburg.²⁷ The longest stay, in Frankfurt, coincided with the final weeks of the Convent of Frankfurt, with which the Swedish general commander Axel Oxenstierna hoped to unite the Protestant side in the Thirty Years War.²⁸ The possible significance of this will occupy us later. Grossmann travelled abroad for the last time in 1636.²⁹ This journey, lasting from May to October, led via Nuremberg and Regensburg to Vienna, and from there, after a stay of several weeks, through Prague and Dresden back to Jena – from which, however, he departed almost immediately for Leipzig, where he spent almost seven months, to all indications in connection with the defence of the city against a siege instituted by the Swedish general Johan Banér.³⁰ Grossmann’s time in Vienna adds another, if still elusive, wrinkle to his biography: an inscription entered at Schloss Pellendorf, home to a branch of the widely ramified Austrian noble family Herberstein, describes him as ‘Hofmeister’ to Georg Jacob Freiherr zu Herberstein, and both Georg Jacob himself and his uncle Julius Freiherr zu Herberstein contributed dedicatory inscriptions as well.³¹

On 27 June 1637, not long after Grossmann’s return from Leipzig, Burchard Grossmann the Elder died.³² Two years later, Grossmann may have resumed his studies at Jena.³³ On 16 February 1641, in Gera, he married Maria Glaser, the daughter of an official there.³⁴ Friends and others, including Zeisold and Beyer, contributed to a volume of poems honouring the pair; Grossmann’s father-in-law commemorated the occasion a month later with a suite of four gouaches, the last of which depicts a couple – presumably meant to portray Burchard and Maria – dancing to nearby musicians (fig. 2).³⁵ At the time of the wedding or shortly afterwards, Grossmann moved to Gera.³⁶ According to Zeisold, he and his wife had two children. In this period, perhaps because of his more settled existence, the once steady stream of entries in his albums peters out; it comes to a complete stop in February 1645, a month after Grossmann returned to Jena to seek treatment for a sudden intense illness.³⁷ He did not recover, but died in Jena on 23 March.³⁸   GROSSMANN’S PURSUITS Despite what we learn from documents like Zeisold’s funeral announcement and the matriculation registers, or can deduce from the friendship books, not a little about Grossmann remains obscure. We never hear of a position in either Jena or Gera, and neither the funeral announcement nor that for his father refers to his military service in more than passing terms or mentions his attachment to Georg Jacob zu Herberstein.³⁹ His father seems not to have had a very high opinion of him. When the elder Grossmann wrote his will in 1636, he complained of long having to subsidize his son’s ‘idle life’ to the tune of a thaler per week upkeep and twenty thalers for a horse; accused the son of harbouring unjust resentment toward him; and added that the younger Burchard had ‘pointlessly and uselessly’ squandered an inheritance from his grandmother ‘with traveling, squabbling, and idleness’.⁴⁰ We shall see that the reference to travel, at least, might not capture the whole story; perhaps we should treat the elder Grossmann’s views with caution, as he does not even spare a word anywhere for his son’s evident military capabilities and exhibits a somewhat crotchety temperament throughout his will. Even allowing for the tendency to flatter, moreover, the dedicatory tributes quoted earlier hardly seem indicative of a ne’er-do-well. Whatever the truth, Grossmann’s albums certainly testify to contacts both with the upper echelons of political authority and with men of learning and the arts.⁴¹ When he visited Dresden in October 1636, for example, contributors to his friendship book included the four sons of the elector, the powerful Oberhofprediger Matthias Hoë von Hoënegg, and the court Kapellmeister Heinrich Schütz.⁴² Schütz, of course, had had dealings with Grossmann’s father, if perhaps only through correspondence. But even apart from this, music would appear to have played a role of some importance in the younger Grossmann’s life.⁴³ His father bequeathed him several volumes of music – including some of particular value – as well as musical instruments. A tablature inscribed on the lower half of a page in the first album amicorum indicates that he played the lute with more than passing skill (fig. 3).⁴⁴ Three of the composers represented in the Angst der Hellen dedicated puzzle canons to him; a correction in one of these could even indicate that he knew counterpoint sufficiently well to ferret out an error. The albums also contain a further purely verbal inscription by a musician, although in this instance not a famous one.

Even more than music, Grossmann’s albums suggest an interest in the visual arts. As Schwartz already observed, ‘many artists … decorated [them] with drawings’; and if the number and concentration of these do not approach, say, the famous collection in the album of Jacob Heyblocq, their very geographical and chronological spread surely indicate that Grossmann made it a point to seek out their makers.⁴⁵ The album containing the Rembrandt drawing preserves no fewer than eight others by artists who either identify themselves as professionals or whom we can identify with greater or lesser security as such through external evidence or the appearance of their work.⁴⁶ These include the Leipzig goldsmith August Richter and the otherwise unknown Leipzig painter Johann Deuerling; the Regensburg painter and engraver Jörg Christoph Eimmart (fig. 4); a painter or apprentice – an early restoration has obscured the portion of his inscription that would tell us which – named David Mentzel; a draftsman with the first name Samuel and a hard-to-read surname possibly decipherable as ‘Tewrer’; another unknown, Valltien Kurtz; and two unquestionably capable artists who left their work without any name at all (fig. 5).⁴⁷

Grossmann’s first album holds an even larger stock of drawings. Artists who contributed to the book in Jena or presumably nearby include Friedrich Wilhelm Franck, Martin Thurschalla, and Andreas Zeideler.⁴⁸ Nine further items no doubt added locally, although unsigned or by authors neither self-identified nor otherwise documented as artists, also look skilful enough to come from professional hands.⁴⁹ A visit to Leipzig in 1632 brought drawings by the painter and engraver Andreas Bretschneider and a presumed relative, Hans Daniel Bretschneider.⁵⁰ Perhaps most important, both the Weimar court painter Christian Richter – no relation to the August of Leipzig – and a young son of the same name make appearances here, as does another member of the family, Jeremias Richter (fig. 6).⁵¹ The inscription accompanying the elder Richter’s drawing addresses Grossmann as his ‘Schwager’ – strictly speaking, brother-in-law, although the term can also refer to any relative by marriage, and surely does so here: Grossmann, then only nineteen and still single, had no full siblings, nor have conjugal links between his parents’ immediate families and the Richters yet come to light.⁵² Nevertheless, just as we can trace Grossmann’s musical inclinations back to his father, it could look as if his interest in the visual arts also had its roots in his family. If the albums offer signs of what we could regard as artistic sympathies, they also undercut a recurrent misconception about Grossmann. More than one writer has seen him as a man of commerce: Julius Held, for instance, called him a ‘merchant’, Schwartz a ‘traveling salesman’, perhaps ‘in the arms business’.⁵³ Given the general reticence of the funeral announcement, some might not wish to lend much weight to the fact that it does not yield any clues in this direction. Yet Hemmann, whose prefatory notes to the two albums leave no doubt that he combed them for biographical information, also fails to describe Burchard Grossmann in terms even suggestive of someone engaged in business.⁵⁴ Nor has my own examination of the books revealed many contacts suggestive of commercial pursuits. Indeed, apart from Rembrandt’s landlord and agent Hendrick Uylenburgh, I have spotted only one, a Leipzig merchant named Christoph Grossmann; and since he describes himself as a relative, we may well think that family ties, not economic interests, lay behind his meeting with Burchard.⁵⁵ No less important, I can find none of the adjectives commonly used to characterize Grossmann used elsewhere in conjunction with merchants. This applies particularly to ‘wohlgelahrt’, which plainly carried with it the implication of higher studies. A survey of funeral sermons and wedding tributes published in German-speaking countries from 1600 to 1650 yields not a single instance of a merchant – Handelsmann – described as ‘wolhgelahrt’.⁵⁶ This should not surprise us: by all indications, men of trade did not attend university but learned through the apprenticeship system.⁵⁷ Grossmann’s service to one of the Herbersteins, if still obscure, also testifies to a social status distinct from that of a traveling salesman. Obviously, we must reconsider some other impressions about Grossmann that have made their way into the literature. For one thing, we cannot sustain the idea that his voyage to Amsterdam in 1634 had an entrepreneurial motive of any sort.⁵⁸ It might still, however, have had something to do with armaments, even if not in the terms hitherto proposed. As Schwartz pointed out, Grossmann’s second album includes more than a few signatures of princes involved in the Thirty Years War, as well as that of Joachim van Wicquefort, the agent in the Dutch Republic of Grossmann’s sovereign, the duke of Saxe-Weimar.⁵⁹ Without exception, these belong to the year 1634; so, too, do several entries by children of rulers enmeshed in the conflict.⁶⁰ The album also contains a striking number of entries by legates and other participants at the Convent of Frankfurt, which suggest that Grossmann took active part in the day-to-day proceedings of the convent.⁶¹ Against this background, we could find it more than coincidental that Amsterdam and Hamburg represented the dominant centres of the arms trade in northern Europe during the Thirty Years War – the Dutch metropolis as ‘above all the central supplier of munitions and weaponry for anti-Habsburg Europe’, while the Hanseatic city had become ‘the northern European centre of information for all the parties in the war, the hub of monetary transactions and of deals, especially those concerning the supply and arming of the military’.⁶² As an officer from a prosperous and well-connected family, Grossmann could perhaps have sought to facilitate purchases of munitions for a native land deeply immersed in a brutal war.⁶³ Hence despite his father’s withering remarks, his voyage may have entailed matters considerably beyond his own amusement. But we do not know; and whatever the case, in any arms deal he pursued he would have acted not as an independent agent but, surely, on command from higher powers.⁶⁴ We may look no less sceptically on ‘the possibility’, as Schwartz puts it, that Grossmann ‘traded in art on the side’.⁶⁵ At the very least, the drawings in his albums cannot have served any immediate material purpose. It seems clear, for one thing, that no one – neither the artists nor Grossmann himself – anticipated their removal. Admittedly,  almost all of them lack dedicatory inscriptions, which in principle would have made it easier to detach and sell them.⁶⁶ Yet not only did artists routinely omit such inscriptions even when contributing to the albums of relatives or close friends, but Martin Thurschalla, one of the draftsmen who accompanied his drawing with nothing more than his name, fit his work into leftover space on a page already written on by someone else (fig. 7).⁶⁷ Conversely, Johannes Deuerling’s drawing had its page to itself for barely a month before someone surrounded it with a lengthy inscription; the reverse side of the leaf on which August Richter made his drawing remained blank for no more than ten days; and no fewer than three later contributors added inscriptions to the page with Andreas Bretschneider’s drawing (fig. 8).⁶⁸ Even without such evidence, in fact, one must wonder about the plausibility of viewing drawings in friendship books from anything but the most remote commercial perspective. If an artist wanted to demonstrate his skills for a buyer elsewhere, he could more easily have produced a separate sheet that an intermediary could pass on, rather than something that would remain within the covers of a personal book; if he wished simply to impress a prospective purchaser, a tour of the studio would have sufficed.⁶⁹

                  To all indications, Grossmann met artists much as he met anyone else who signed his albums. We get a sense of this, I would suggest, from the context surrounding two of the drawings in the first album amicorum. A series of entries there documents a brief trip to Leipzig in the early summer of 1632. The first entry belongs to Christoph Grossmann, who signed on Monday 25 June; as we have seen, this could well reflect nothing more than a reunion of family members.⁷⁰ The next day brought contributions from no fewer than five people: three students – one of them a nobleman – and the Bretschneiders.⁷¹ On Wednesday two more students signed the album; these included Christian Michael, already known as a composer and soon to become organist at the church of St Nicholas in Leipzig, who inscribed one of the puzzle canons referred to earlier.⁷² Finally, on Thursday 28 June Hieronymus Reckleben, professor of logic at the university, added his inscription.⁷³ On this visit, in other words, Grossmann appears to have consorted all but exclusively with members of the academic community or creative artists – in the case of Christian Michael, both at once. I would pause a moment longer over the canon that Michael entered the day after the Bretschneiders contributed their drawings. Grossmann cannot have had any pecuniary interest in this little musical exercise, or in any of the music in his albums. He could have invited others to share the challenge of resolving the canons; he could possibly have played the lute piece for interested friends. But music on paper – especially music in a personal book or in the abbreviated notation of canons – did not really exist as fungible currency in that time. Short of perhaps a good report on his talents to possible future employers, Michael, too, had nothing to gain from the little bit of notation with which he graced the album of a former patron’s son.⁷⁴ I would think that we must see the drawings in essentially the same light: just as they, like the music, sit with no perceptible line of demarcation among entries of more usual sorts, so too do the circumstances of their creation, insofar as we can trace them, fail to hint at anything that would mark them as something other than tokens of social interchange. Let me summarize the picture we now have of Burchard Grossmann the Younger: a wealthy young man, close in age to Rembrandt; literate; well versed in music; and particularly given to the visual arts and conversant – if strictly as a well-born amateur – with those who made it.⁷⁵ It takes no stretch of the imagination to read this description as that of a very suitable patron for Rembrandt. This, in fact, removes one of the issues that troubled Benesch, who claimed that Grossmann ‘was hardly very interested in art’.⁷⁶ Yet it does not remove every anomaly.   GROSSMANN AND REMBRANDT

Although Rembrandt left his drawing in Grossmann’s second album amicorum undated but for the year, everyone agrees that it must come from June 1634. Indeed, as Broos seems first to have observed, it all but certainly dates from 18 June, as Uylenburgh, in whose house the artist lived and whose cousin Saskia he would marry shortly afterwards in Friesland, made an entry of his own on that day.⁷⁷ This brings us to the nub of the problem: what led Grossmann to Uylenburgh’s house, and why should Rembrandt favour the German visitor with a drawing? For all of Grossmann’s obvious responsiveness to art, his albums give no indication that he knew any artist in the Netherlands other than Rembrandt. Yet Rembrandt, as Benesch pointed out, did not enjoy more than essentially local – or in any event not very wide-ranging – celebrity in 1634.⁷⁸ Supposed indications to the contrary dematerialize on closer inspection. The longstanding assumption that Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione in Genoa knew etchings of Rembrandt by that year has no basis.⁷⁹ Similarly, while the French-texted music in one of Sebastian Stoskopff’s two still lives with reproductions of early Rembrandt etchings could support the assumption that both predate Stoskopff’s return from Paris to his native Strasbourg in or around 1640, the upper end of the dating ‘Vers 1631-1635’ given by one of the principle monographs represents only an approximation.⁸⁰ The three paintings given by Robert Kerr to Charles I of England between 1629 and 1639 appear not to have brought any others in their wake until the next decade at the earliest; and however credible the speculation that Richelieu’s agent Alfonso Lopez purchased Balaam from Rembrandt in the late 1620s, some ten years before their first documented contact, this transaction, too, had no identifiable successors.⁸¹ Etched copies by Wenceslaus Hollar of Rembrandt’s Naked Woman Seated on a Mound and Saskia with Pearls in her Hair, both dated 1635, also leave matters unchanged, as Hollar visited Amsterdam the previous year; not only do we thus have no reason to think he would have become acquainted with these works anywhere else, but we could even read his decision to copy them as an indication that he expected no one in Germany to know the originals first-hand.⁸² Finally, reproductive etchings associated with Willem de Leeuw that some regard as evidence for knowledge of Rembrandt in Flanders around 1633 originated both at a slightly later date and – more important – in the Dutch Republic.⁸³ Rembrandt’s fame would spread soon enough, of course. But for the early years of the decade, Benesch’s conclusion seems to hold. At first sight, this could appear to support the idea that Grossmann, even if not someone engaged in commerce, came to Uylenburgh looking to make a purchase or commission – either for himself or for another party – and simply chanced on the rising young painter living there.⁸⁴ It does not take long, however, for second thoughts to emerge. These start with Grossmann himself. To all appearances, his part of the world lacked anything like what we would call an art market.⁸⁵ Hence, short of assuming that someone else sent him to Uylenburgh, his presence there as a customer presupposes a greater familiarity with how things worked in Amsterdam than we might want to ascribe to him after barely a day or two in the city.⁸⁶ More crucially, a surprise encounter hardly explains Rembrandt’s side of the equation. As Benesch also noted, the artist did not make a habit of contributing to friendship books.⁸⁷ We know of only two others that contain drawings of his; and not only do both of these volumes date from many years after Grossmann’s, but one belonged to a friend of long standing, the other to someone with whom Rembrandt would have had more than a few friends, acquaintances, and professional associates in common.⁸⁸ As our consideration of the other drawings in Grossmann’s albums has shown, Rembrandt would have had nothing obvious to gain through volunteering one of his own; nor can we assume that the book Grossmann gave him to sign offered a precedent for doing so – the dated drawings elsewhere in its pages all come from later years.⁸⁹ This leaves those who would frame the situation in more or less simple economic terms with three possible scenarios: Grossmann paid for the drawing; Rembrandt received no money but made it to curry favour with a potential source of future income; or he rewarded Grossmann with a bonus for engineering a lucrative arrangement of some sort.⁹⁰ None of these strikes me as very realistic. All of them, for one thing, would have contravened what we might describe as the ethos of the friendship book: Not even contemporaries who took a dim view of the entire phenomenon claimed that anyone demanded payment for an entry, or that those soliciting one offered any inducement beyond a drink – a point implicitly underscored by Rembrandt himself in the familiar inscription to his drawing, ‘Een vroom gemoet | Acht eer voor goet’.⁹¹  The second and third scenarios, meanwhile, presuppose an artist far more accommodating to sources of patronage than shown at least in documents from later in his life. True, his letters to Constantijn Huygens, still in the 1630s, about the Passion paintings commissioned by Frederik Hendrik show him able to play the register of courtly obsequiousness when necessary; but I wonder how much we can infer from that example about his relations with members of other social milieus.⁹² Nor does Grossmann seem in a position to have advanced Rembrandt’s interests in any particular way – certainly, historians have yet to discover an early concentration of Rembrandt paintings, or even etchings, in Germany that could bolster suspicions in that direction.⁹³

Puzzlement over what stubbornly refuses to look like anything but an uncharacteristic ges­ture on Rembrandt’s part would vanish, of course, if the artist already knew Grossmann, or if they at least knew someone in common. Curiously, this suggestion seems not to have surfaced any­where since Benesch, who rather fancifully proposed that Grossmann’s father might have visited Holland at an earlier time.⁹⁴ Yet a closer look at Grossmann’s first voyage to the Netherlands makes one wonder why not. The earliest dated entries in his second album amicorum document contacts with notable scholars at the University of Leiden: on 8 June 1629 the rector, the philoso­pher Franco van Burgersdijck, entered an inscription; in the same month, although without a spe­cific date, the philologist and poet Daniel Heinsius did so as well.⁹⁵ Grossmann had clearly come to Leiden directly from Jena, which he had left less than four and a half weeks earlier; especially if we bear in mind his subsequent matriculation at Altdorf, the presence in his album of two such prominent academics encourages the suspicion that he embarked on his journey with the intent of pursuing studies at Leiden.⁹⁶ The matriculation records of the university, however, do not show his name, and his album contains no further entries for several months.⁹⁷ But could this very si­lence mean that he remained in Leiden, even without matriculating, for a while?⁹⁸ By all indications, he did not venture very far afield during this period: when the entries in his album resume, in late February 1630, they show him in The Hague and vicinity, then Dordrecht, obviously on his way to Nuremberg.⁹⁹ It may also speak for prior experience at the university that he seems to have gravitated there when he returned briefly to Leiden in July 1634: of the four entries in his album from those days, one belongs to a professor and two to students from Germany.¹⁰⁰ The fact that Grossmann – especially given what we now know of him – passed through Rembrandt’s home town in 1629 and could even have spent some months there has provocative implications. However far the artist’s reputation did or did not extend at the time, art lovers in Leiden had clearly taken notice of him; hence a visitor of Grossmann’s inclinations could scarcely fail to have heard his name.¹⁰¹ But at this point, the gaps in the evidence urge us not to push speculation further. Much as I should like, for instance, to strengthen my inferences about Grossmann’s first stay in the Netherlands by showing that he acquired a working knowledge of Dutch, his album hardly allows for definitive conclusions on the matter: although Rembrandt and Uylenburgh wrote in their native language, the only other entries by Dutchmen not written in Latin either use German or combine a Dutch heading with a German – if rather Dutch-inflected – body text.¹⁰² Similarly, while Daniel Heinsius could look like an especially tantalizing figure when we realize that he not only contributed to Grossmann’s album but also had close ties to Rembrandt’s probable early supporter Petrus Scriverius, his potential significance diminishes with the discovery that he turned out inscriptions for visiting German students by the dozen, almost always following the same standard pattern as in the one he wrote for Grossmann: the motto ‘Quantum est quod nescimus’ at the start, a quotation from Theocratus at the end.¹⁰³ In all likelihood, we shall never know for sure whether Rembrandt and Grossmann met in Leiden.¹⁰⁴ Nor can we tell how Grossmann, five years later, would have known of Rembrandt’s move to Amsterdam, although it doesn’t take much effort to come up with plausible hypotheses: mutual contacts, for example, could easily have passed on news of Rembrandt’s whereabouts. Still, I think the probabilities favour the assumption that when Grossmann visited the home of Hendrick Uylenburgh in June 1634, he went there specifically to see Rembrandt – and that he did not come as a stranger. In other words, on present evidence it looks more likely than not that Rembrandt drew his portrait of an old man for someone he knew well enough, whether through first-hand acquaintance or through a trusted recommendation, to consider worthy of such a gift.¹⁰⁵

Grossmann’s visit may have left one further trace. Rembrandt’s graphic output includes a curious pair of etchings (fig.11) in which two peasants comment on the weather: ‘Tis vinnich kout’ says the first, to which the second responds, ‘Dats niet’ – ‘It’s awfully cold’; ‘That’s nothing’.¹⁰⁶ The images and the inscriptions derive from two much older works by Sebald Beham; there, the texts read ‘ES IST KALT WETER’ and ‘DAS SCHADET NIT’ (fig.12).¹⁰⁷ Just as Rembrandt treats Beham’s figures with considerable freedom, his rendering of the peasants’ remarks also takes some liberties with the original, both in the added intensifier ‘vinnich’ and in the compression of ‘das schadet nit’, which literally means ‘that doesn’t do any harm’.¹⁰⁸ Whether or not Rembrandt knew any German, his Dutch reads not so much like a translation made directly from a written text as it does like remembered snippets of conversational paraphrase – an impromptu explanation of Beham’s inscriptions.¹⁰⁹ The two etchings stand out as anomalies in Rembrandt’s output. Their very identity as a pair renders them singular, as does the presence of spoken vernacular text. Even the subjects, conventional as they may seem, mark the prints as a rarity. At latest count, Rembrandt created only two other etchings devoted to peasants, and none between ca. 1630 and the start of the 1650s; nor does theperiod to which the Beham adaptations belong include more than a very few genre subjects of any sort.¹¹⁰ Attributing all these features to dependence on his model only begs a more fundamental question. Rembrandt did not take anything else from Beham.¹¹¹ Indeed, he seldom relied on German precedents; and when he did, he typically borrowed nothing more than isolated motifs, only once – and quite a bit later – appropriating more or less a whole composition.¹¹² We might wonder, therefore, what stirred him to make such an unusual adaptation of such a remote source – especially if he needed someone to translate the peasants’ exchange. It could thus seem of more than routine interest that the calling peasants, insofar as we can assume both to have borne the same date, come from the same year as an art-loving German’s visit to Rembrandt in Amsterdam; indeed, statistics favour, if ever so slightly, a dating after Rembrandt and Grossmann met.¹¹³ Does it go too far to suspect a connection here?

Certainly, it takes little effort to imagine possibilities. We could think, for example, that Grossmann – whose artistic inclinations would hardly not have extended to prints – presented these tiny keepsakes to Rembrandt; one can even picture the two of them, together with Uylenburgh, contemplating and discussing Beham’s work.¹¹⁴ Those who would rather assume that Rembrandt acquired the two Beham engravings in his normal course of collecting might nevertheless see him bringing them out to ask his guest about their inscriptions; or recollection of the meeting with Grossmann could have prompted him to take what turned into a productive new look at them. Some, of course, may prefer to avoid such speculation entirely and consider Rembrandt’s engagement with Beham a purely internal affair, stimulated by nothing more than his appetite for competition with eminent predecessors; should he have needed help with Beham’s German, this argument might go, Uylenburgh could have provided it – Uylenburgh had lived, after all, for a time in Danzig, a city with a largely German population.¹¹⁵ Yet Danzig also included a sizeable number of Poles, whose language Uylenburgh had evidently learned growing up in Kraków, and a substantial Dutch contingent as well, so we cannot assume too much about his interactions with the German majority.¹¹⁶ In fact, I know of no real evidence that Uylenburgh knew German – if anything, his use of Dutch in Grossmann’s album implies the opposite.¹¹⁷ With Grossmann, on the other hand, all the pieces fit together. Hence even if we cannot prove that he had a part in the story behind Rembrandt’s two peasants, the supposition that he did would clear up yet another small puzzle in the artist’s work.   About the author: Joshua Rifkin has performed and recorded extensively as conductor, pianist, and harpsichordist, and pursues research in music (Josquin Desprez, Heinrich Schütz, J. S. Bach) and art (Willem de Leeuw, J. G. van Vliet, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout). Recent publications include ‘Musste Josquin Josquin werden? Zum Problem des Frühwerks’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 74 (2017) 162–84; and ‘Milan, Motet Cycles, Josquin: Further Thoughts on a Familiar Topic’, Daniele V. Philippi and Agnese Pavanello (eds.), Motet Cycles between Devotion and Liturgy (Basel 2019) 221-335.  

This essay, although written and scheduled for publication some ten years ago, fell victim to circumstances that delayed its appearance until now. I owe its inclusion in the present Kroniek to David de Witt and Michael Zell, as well as to support of various kinds from Judith Noorman and Jeroen Vandommele. Both the character of the text itself as well as external factors have precluded any but minor revisions – although fortunately, nothing in the subsequent literature has demanded more. I should draw special attention, however, to Judith Noorman’s independent, if necessarily abbreviated, treatment of the same subject cited in note 1 below, and also to the article of Stephanie Sailer cited in note 88 below; my thanks, too, to David de Witt for his careful, and often productively sceptical, reading of what follows. Going back further in time, I continue to owe warmest thanks to the two dedicatees for information and encouragement, and to Michael Zell, who also encouraged my research in its initial stages and offered several helpful suggestions.