The 'Naer het Leven' AffairSource: Simiolus: Netherlands Quarterly for the History of Art, Vol. 5, No. 3/4 (1971), pp.137-138Published by: Stichting voor Nederlandse Kunsthistorische PublicatiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3780475 .

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The 'Naer het Leven' Affair

The naer het leven affair is now over two years old. In the spring of 1970 there appeared in Oud Holland an article by F. van Leeuwen entitled 'lets over het handschrift van de "naar het leven"-tekenaar' (vol. 85 [1970], 25-32). The author argued that a well-known group of drawings (the so-called 'naer het leven', henceforth nhl drawings), formerly ascribed to Pieter Brueghel, were the work of Roelant Savery. His evidence was the handwriting of the inscriptions on the drawings; a close comparison had convinced van Leeuwen that the handwriting corresponded to the smallest detail with that of Savery. At the same moment, Master Drawings published an article by Joaneath Spicer, 'The "Naer het Leven" drawings: by Pieter Bruegel or Roelandt Savery?' She too attributed the drawings to Savery. At the beginning of her article she states that the attribution to Savery had never been publicly defended or systematically in- vestigated. Although this may have been literally true, it passed over a vital point that Miss Spicer did not have the

right to disregard. On April 13, 1967, F. van Leeuwen delivered a paper in Prof. I. Q. van Regteren Altena's werkcollege on 16th-century draftsmen in which he defended the attribution to Savery. That paper formed the basis for the above-mentioned article in Oud Holland, which van Leeuwen published at the instigation of Prof. van Regteren Altena. The manuscript of the article was submitted to the editors of Oud Holland in December 1968. Because of the long delay in publication, van Leeuwen put together a summary of his paper and

published it in a few copies in the form of a brochure which he sent to several institutes and art historians in November 1969. At the beginning of the year, in January, van Leeuwen had already mailed several art historians a New Year's Card with a reproduction of Savery's drawing of Prague, labelled'... DOOR DE "NAAR HETLEVEN"-TEKENAAR'. The growth of an earnest nhl affair is due largely to van Leeuwen's well-publicized outrage against two

of the statements in Miss Spicer's article and Miss Spicer's refusal to apologize for them. Not only did she suggest at the beginning of her article that she was the first to defend the attribution to Savery in public, in note 27 she wrote moreover that 'F. van Leeuwen ... may very possibly have discovered other legitimate examples of Bruegel's handwriting.' From this one would conclude that Miss Spicer did not know that van Leeuwen had studied the handwriting on the nhl drawings, and that he had identified it as Savery's. But she did know this. Long before she completed her article for Master Drawings, which was submitted in July 1969, she knew everything there was to know about van Leeuwen's study and his conclusions. When she visited van Leeuwen in Amsterdam at the end of December 1968, after his article had been submitted to Oud Holland, he had shared with her his thoughts on the problem. For that matter, she had already been informed about van Leeuwen's discovery by Prof. van Regteren Altena. At the re- quest of van Leeuwen, who had heard that Miss Spicer's dissertation concerned Savery as a draftsman, Prof. van Regteren Altena had told Miss Spicer about van Leeuwen's paper when he met her in America in January 1968. The nhl affair grew because van Leeuwen protested against Miss Spicer's incorrect representation of the

matter, and because he received no satisfaction in return. (His failure to mention Miss Spicer at all in his article in Oud Holland is due, he claims, to the fact that neither Miss Spicer nor anyone else had told him, before his and her articles appeared in spring 1970, of her findings, which were first made public at the International Congress of the History of Art in Prague in May 1969.) The history of the affair has been traced and analyzed in a brochure by T. Varekamp entitled De NhL-

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affaire van A-X, Amsterdam 1971 * Varekamp reports that Miss Spicer claimed to have defended Savery's authorship of the drawings in her M.A. thesis, submitted to Yale University in May 1967. She repeats this in her response to a letter by T. Varekamp and H. Redeker in Master Drawings 9 (1971), 284-5. Since then Varekamp has examined a copy of the thesis, and has discovered that Miss Spicer explicitly rejects the attribution to Savery. It now appears that van Leeuwen was the first to defend the attribution of the nhl drawings to Savery-

in his paper of April 13, 1967, a summary of which he subsequently distributed. As a major document of the affair, we are reproducing the summary in its original form, with an English resume added.

The editors

* We had intended to publish van Leeuwen's article and this note early in 1972, but the transfer of Simiolus from one publisher to another put us behind schedule.

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