Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678)

Trois Crayons Magazine, April 2026

One of these drawings is by a pupil and close follower of Rembrandt, produced in 1646, while the other is a copy by an eighteenth-century French artist, Charles Coypel. Which drawing is the model and which is the copy? For a bonus point, can you name the Rembrandt pupil?

• Answer

  The original is the upper image.

  Upper Image: attributed to Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627–1678), Sitting Male Nude, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, inv. no.: FL 251

  Lower Image: Charles-Antoine Coypel (1694–1752) after Samuel Van Hoogstraten (1627–1678), Étude d’homme assis, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris, inv. no.: 10995

  The upper drawing, which is presumed to be Rembrandt’s pupil van Hoogstraten, belongs to a group of stylistically comparable figure studies from the artist’s student days. The drawing can be dated to around 1646 as the model and his position are drawn from a print rendered by Rembrandt earlier that year. Over half a century later, the drawing entered the collection of one of Charles-Antoine Coypel’s patrons, the Marquis de Paulmy, and arrived in Paris, where it was copied by Coypel. Coypel’s copy is an example of how collecting tastes have affected training and the history of art, and testifies to the influence of Dutch painters of the seventeenth century on the French painters of the eighteenth.