After cataloguing Douce’s prints of ‘Cricket, Racquets &c., Bat and Ball’, I have just started working on his images of ‘Billiards, Bowling, [Quoits], Skittles &c’. The first few mounts contained the usual Doucean mix of engravings from various Dutch books of emblems, French eighteenth-century etchings and early German prints. But this was quite unexpected:
Rembrandt, A man playing ringball, 1654, etching (Ashmolean Museum, Oxford)
Despite his fondness for Dutch prints, Douce did not seem particularly interested in Rembrandt. He owned at least ten prints and a drawing by this artist but, so far, I have not come across his name in any of the lengthy discussions of printmaking-related issues that are a regular feature of his correspondence with George Cumberland and Thomas Kerrich. The etching above is the second of two known states (it does not show the border and the white area along the top margin that can be seen in the first state).
Douce probably acquired this etching because of the figure playing with a club and a ball in the background. Though the print is commonly referred to as ‘the kolf player’ or ‘the golfer’, the sport depicted is actually called ‘Klossen’ (see Stogdon 2011, p. 291). The combination of three different scenes has been interpreted as a representation of ‘the active and passive aspects of the theme of leisure’, while this type of game could have been regarded at the time as ‘a metaphor of the Game of Life’ (Dickey 1986, p. 258).