I was entranced by Scot exhibition of Rembrandt, Dürer and Van Dyck

Four stars

Dominating the end wall of the first room of Dürer To Van Dyck, a new exhibition at the Royal Scottish Academy in Edinburgh, is a photograph, blown up so it reaches from floor to ceiling. Taken around 1890, it shows the South Sketch Gallery at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire, seat since 1549 of the aristocratic Cavendish family whose scions include the current 12th Duke of Devonshire, Peregrine Cavendish.

The image itself reveals a long, wide, well-lit corridor and, though the eye is drawn to the black space at the end of it (a stairwell perhaps?), what’s important is what’s on the walls: framed drawings, dozens and dozens of them, crammed so closely together they look like tiles in a mosaic. These are just some of the treasures of Chatsworth House, and it’s from that deep well that this fascinating exhibition is drawn. Even better, all but two of the exhibits are being shown in Scotland for the first time.

Also lording it over this first room – quite literally – is the man who became the 2nd Duke of Devonshire in 1707, William Cavendish. His likeness comes to us in the form of a glowing portrait by John Riley, and shows the Duke as a young man. It was William who in 1723 bought a collection of at least 225 drawings from Dutch collector Nicolaes Flinck, whose own father had worked with Rembrandt. Among those works were drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Albrecht Dürer and Anthony Van Dyck as well as nine by Rembrandt. They joined a collection bought at auction in 1688 by William’s father and together with the Flinck collection they form the core of the Chatsworth House trove.

A Double Portrait of Sir Peter Paul Rubens and Sir Anthony Van Dyck by Erasmus Quellinus II (1607-1678), oil on panel, 1640s or 1650s. © The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth.  (Image: free)Today it holds around 1800 drawings by Old Masters. Only a fraction of them are assembled in Edinburgh, but the heavy-hitters are here – Rembrandt, Rubens and Holbein the Younger as well as Dürer and Van Dyck – alongside a host of artists whose names are less well known but whose work is every bit as accomplished and fascinating.

Zurich-born Jost Amman, for example, who almost certainly did not ever clap eyes on a lion but whose postcard-sized Lion Mask from around 1570 is all the more appealing for it. Or painter Sebastiaen Vrancx, best known for vast battle scenes but here represented by sketches of streets he made in Rome in the late 16th century. See the view from the Porta del Popolo, as drawn by a Dutch tourist in 1596.

Some of the most captivating works aren’t even attributed. Gone from the record is the name of the artist who gave us the watercolour with the snappy title Head Of A Roebuck With Monstrous Antlers (So Called Wig Buck). Like something right-clicked from a Pinterest page devoted to folk horror its subject is a roebuck deer which, due to a lack of testosterone, is unable to form antlers and instead forms something resembling a wig. Or a wig as it looked in the 1580s. Along with Amman’s lion, Van Dyck’s vicious horned bovines and muscular horses, and Rubens’ gnarled, dying trees, it reveals a crop of northern European artists finding inspiration in the less bucolic corners of the natural world.

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The various Dukes of Devonshire being not much given to thoughts of diversity or representation, there are no works here by women and only one or two even showing female subjects. Visitors are informed of this lack by the panel texts. The more art-savvy among them may also reflect on it as they view Maarten Van Heemskerck’s Susanna Accused By The Elders from 1562 – after all, the most powerful artistic rendering of the same Old Testament story is the one painted by trail-blazing female artist Artemisia Gentileschi in 1610.

They may also reflect on the act of collecting, on the journeys these works have made since their creation in the hothouse of creativity which was the Low Countries of the 16th and 17th centuries, and on the stories surrounding some of the works and their makers.

Meet Flanders-born Roelant Savery, another tourist fond of sketching city streets. He found his way to Prague in 1604 and became court painter to not one but two Holy Roman Emperors, first Rudolf II and then Rudolf’s younger brother, Mathias. Savery made a numbered series of street scenes in Prague. Through his eyes visitors can see that city as it was in the year Othello had its London premiere. One of the drawings ended up at Chatsworth but two are in Scotland’s national collection. All three are presented here, gathered together for the first time in at least 300 years.

Jost Amman, Lion mask. The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement (Image: free)And did you heard the one about the stolen Quellinus? A painting from the 1640s by Erasmus Quellinus the Younger showing Rubens and his gifted former pupil Van Dyck was in the Chatsworth collection but was stolen from a gallery in Eastbourne in 1979 while on loan. Enter Belgian art historian Bert Schepers, who in 2021 tracked it down to a small regional auction house in Toulon on the French Riviera.

That painting takes pride of place in the exhibition’s second room, which is devoted to works by Rubens and Van Dyck. Here you can see also examples of Van Dyck’s so-called Iconography Series, including his chalk and ink drawing of English architect Inigo Jones, as well as many sketch studies of heads by Rubens.

The Rembrandt drawings are displayed in the show’s final room. Five of them are sketches the artist made on his walks along the Amstel river in Amsterdam, others are studies for larger works such as St John The Baptist Preaching, from around 1633, or views of the town of Rhenen near Utrecht. There’s also a fascinating drawing of the actor Willem Bartelsz Ruyters in his role as Bishop Goswin in a popular Dutch tragedy. Ruyters was a regular subject for Rembrandt, himself a keen theatregoer.

Monstrously horned head of a stag. The Devonshire Collections, Chatsworth. Reproduced by permission of the Trustees of Chatsworth (Image: free)One notable aspect of Dürer To Van Dyck is the relative lack of religious subjects. The artists’ concentration here seems to be on the real and the corporeal: people, animals, trees, buildings. Nor do they idealise or romanticise. That would happen a century or so later. But if imagined landscapes are your thing, check out Hendrick Goltzius’ An Arcadian Landscape, from 1593, one of the first examples of the form in all of Dutch art.

There’s also Rupprecht Heller’s weird, dark ink work from 1520 showing a battle scene, only this one is entirely imagined and feels like something out of Lord Of The Rings – a tightly-packed ghost army swarming over a bridge to attack a citadel of domes and intricate spires. As with so much of this exhibition, the supporting actors are every bit as interesting as the stars.

Dürer to Van Dyck: Drawings From Chatsworth House is at the Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh (until February 23, 2025) 

Barry Didcock is an Edinburgh-based Herald writer and freelance journalist specialising in arts, culture and media. He can be found on X at @BarryDidcock