Jacques Bellange - Drawings

Drawings

About 80 to 100 drawings attributed to Bellange survive, though many of these would not be accepted by all authorities; there is no catalogue raisonné as yet. The concentration on religious subjects in the prints is less marked in the drawings. Only one drawing that is clearly the preparatory working drawing for an etching survives, The Virgin and Child with the Magdalen and Saint Anne at Yale, which has been intensively worked on and was apparently gone over with a blind (inkless) stylus to transfer the main outlines onto the plate at the start of etching. A drawing in the Louvre is of a group of background figures for another print, and many drawings are similar to the etchings but with different compositions, perhaps preliminary sketches; "they are nearly always spontaneous, swift and tense", and often mainly in wash.

Other drawings unrelated to his etchings survive, and in 1600-1602, long before he is known to have etched himself, Bellange supplied the prolific Flemish printmaker Crispijn de Passe, best known in Britain for his print of the Gunpowder Plotters a few years later, who was then living in Cologne, with drawings for eight prints that de Passe engraved, crediting Bellange with the design (inv. or invenit) on the plate. Five of these were a series called Mimicarum aliquot facetiarum icones ad habitum italicum expressi or "Depictions of some droll witticisms, rendered in the Italian manner".

A drawing of a single figure then described as of Hercules sold for the remarkable price of £542,500 at Sotheby's in 2001, and is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, which has decided it represents Samson.

• Equestrian statue, Louvre

• Study for background group in the Raising of Lazarus, Louvre

• Samson or Hercules, see text. Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Figure of a young woman, British Museum