Born in Haarlem in 1660, Cornelis Dusart was the son of Johannes Dusart (1626-1691), the organist at St. Bavo’s church and one of the last and favourite pupils of the genre painter and draughtsman Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685) with whom he studied between c. 1675 and 1679. He became a member of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke in 1679 and served as its dean in 1692. When van Ostade died in 1685, Dusart inherited the contents of his studio and completed some unfinished paintings by him, an activity that influenced him profoundly. He also owned a large collection of drawings and prints by other prominent artists such as Cornelis Bega (1631-1664), Gerrit Berckheyde (1638-1698), Adriaen van de Velde (1636-1672) and Jan Steen (1626-1679) who influenced his work.
Dusart was an immensely productive draughtsman and considered to be the last major exponent of the seventeenth century Dutch peasant genre tradition. His many carefully executed figure studies were sometimes drawn from life. During the 1680s and 1690s in particular, he produced a number of drawings on parchment ranging from single figures or heads to complex compositions.
Dusart executed several circular caricatural heads, such as for example those formerly in the Unicorno collection (chalk and watercolor on vellum, about 152 mm).[1] Other drawings with similar dimensions are in Paris, Musée du Louvre, Cabinet des Dessins (signed and dated 1690, 95 mm, Inv. 22584) and in St Petersburg, Hermitage (signed, Inv. 40413). There are also two circular watercolor tronies of old and ugly women, one in the British Museum (Inv. 1984-1-8-1, Hind no. 12) and the other in Leiden (PK-T-AW-47), on a rectangular support with the roundels slightly smaller at about 76-78 mm. While Dusart executed a series of monk tronies which were used for mezzotints in two publications satirizing the Catholic church, the other circular tronies, among them the present drawing, were not intended to be series but testify his interest in these distorted types in the late 1680s-c.1690, and these are all variations on the theme.
We are grateful to Dr. Susan Anderson (Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum, Cambridge) for confirming the authorship of the present drawing, and for having provided information regarding the circular watercolor tronies by Dusart.
[1] Sale Amsterdam, Sotheby’s, 19 May 2004, lot 78 and following.
