Window mode follows your eyes with your camera, in this browser only: no picture or position leaves your device.
A Camel
Cornelis Saftleven (Dutch, 1607-1681)
1646
- Medium
- Black chalk and brush and black wash, with touches of brown and ochre chalk, on ivory laid paper
- Classification
- Drawing and Watercolor
- Dimensions
- 20.4 × 31.3 cm (8 1/16 × 12 3/8 in.)
- Culture
- Holland
- Museum
- Art Institute of Chicago, Prints and Drawings
- Credit line
- Clarence Buckingham Collection
- Rights
- Public domain (CC0), as the museum states it.
- Who can see it
- Little Ones profiles and older: it shows gentle subjects for the very young. How works are placed
View at the Art Institute of Chicago
About this work
Although foreign to Europe, camels and other non-native animals were sometimes displayed as curiosities on the continent. Cornelis Saftleven recorded one such rare encounter, capturing the animal’s fur by using a combination of black, brown, and ocher chalk, in some areas (the head and haunches) wetting the media to create denser passages in contrast to the dryer, more disperse use of chalk elsewhere. The addition of ink wash added further shading to suggest the volumes of the camel’s body.
Description © Art Institute of Chicago, CC BY 4.0
