Studies of a Naked Seated Boy (c. 1603): Art, History and Details

Studies of a Naked Seated Boy (c. 1603) is in the Cleveland Museum of Art collection. The museum's creator attribution is Jacob de Gheyn II (Netherlandish, 1565–1629).

The work and its context

The museum's open-access catalogue describes the work:

This sheet of studies of a young male model drawn from various angles is among the earliest nudes drawn from life in the Netherlands. The artist Jacques de Gheyn carefully observed the boy’s body and poses, concentrating on the modeling of his skin and muscles through light and shadow rendered with a combination of black and white chalks on gray-blue paper. The directness of this study was unusual in the Northern Netherlands around 1600, where the vogue for mythological scenes inspired human bodies that were more artificial than natural.

Object facts

• Title: Studies of a Naked Seated Boy
• Date: c. 1603
• Creator attribution: Jacob de Gheyn II (Netherlandish, 1565–1629)
• Culture: Netherlands, 16th - 17th century
• Type: Drawing
• Technique: Black chalk and white chalks with stumping on gray-blue antique laid paper
• Dimensions: Sheet: 23.7 x 16.5 cm (9 5/16 x 6 1/2 in.)
• Collection: DR - Dutch
• Department: Drawings
• Accession number: 2019.2

Collection credit

John L. Severance Fund

Further reading listed by the museum

• Regteren Altena, I. Q. van. Jacques De Gheyn, Three Generations. The Hague: M. Nijhoff Publishers, 1983.
• Peters, Emily. “Acquisitions 2019: Drawings.” Cleveland Art: Cleveland Museum of Art Members Magazine 60, no. 2 (March/April 2020): 20-21.
• Peters, Emily J., Laura Ritter, William Griswold, Klaus Albrecht Schröder, and Koenraad Jonckheere. Tales of the City: Drawing in the Netherlands from Bosch to Bruegel. Cleveland, OH : Cleveland Museum of Art, 2022.

View the collection record

See the museum's photographs and full catalogue entry. Catalogue text is reproduced from the Cleveland Museum of Art's open-access data, with HTML formatting removed. This object and its supplied image are designated CC0.