The Derelict Church of Sloten

In 1903 the National Gallery acquired several Old Master drawings that had belonged to J. C. Dahl, including The old and the new church at Sloten. It was uncertain, however, whether the drawing was in fact by Rembrandt and which church ruin it depicted.

The drawing remained overlooked until 1973, when the Rembrandt scholar Egbert Haverkamp Begemann saw it and immediately verified its authenticity. Haverkamp Begemann was familiar with Frits Lugt’s handwritten catalogue of Rembrandt’s drawings, where the drawing at hand was identified on the basis of an eighteenth-century etching, but presumed lost. However, a collector’s stamp on the reverse of the drawing shows that it once belonged to J. Pz. Zoomer, who was a friend of Rembrandt’s son Titus, and it is thus highly probable that it was Rembrandt who drew it. Haverkamp Begemann recognized the image because of Roeland Roghman’s seventeenth-century etching, labelled “Oü en nieue Kerk te Sloten”. Sloten is a small village southwest of Amsterdam.

Rembrandt drew the ruins, the new church, and the vegetation with a fine pen on a sheet of paper he had coated with a shade of light brown. Even though parts of the drawing have been done in great detail, the lines are free and the drawing seems to have been executed on site; that Rembrandt took his drawing tools with him while wandering about the environs of Amsterdam can be seen from a number of his works. The fence in the foreground, which has been drawn with a coarser pen, is assumed to be a later addition that was not based on reality but added to round out the picture’s composition.