Hendrik Gijsmans

He also created topographical drawings of some of the places that he visited during his trip to and from Italy including from the Rhône region and Lyon.

He moved to Frankenthal in 1586 where he was a member of a large community of Flemish artists and merchants who had also emigrated from Flanders.

The art historian Cornelius von Fabriczy published in 1893 for the first time fifty views of Flanders, France and Italy which were in the collection of the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.

The unknown artist was identified with Hendrik Gijsmans by Stijn Alsteens (Hans Buijs, Véronique Mathot, Willem Schellinks, Paysages de France: dessinés par Lambert Doomer et les artistes hollandais et flamands des XVIe et XVIIe siècles, Fondation Custodia, 2008, pp. 221–226).

This was thanks to the discovery of a drawing representing Saint-Vallier in the Rhone Valley, which had been acquired by the Louvre Museum and was datable to 1567 or later.

This identification led to the attribution to Gijsmans of almost all the 50 drawings in the Staatsgalerie formerly ascribed to Anonymous Fabriczy.

[4] The Flemish origins of the author of the drawings in Stuttgart are not only confirmed by the inclusion among the drawings of views of cities in the Southern Netherlands such as Antwerp, Dendermonde, Brussels and Huy, but also by a style similar to the refined graphics of Pieter Bruegel the Elder.