The present sheet, bearing the number "372", must have been executed between 1780, when Cats inscribed the number "330" on a drawing of "A Frozen Canal in a City with Skaters and Figures Loading Barrels" sold in New York, Christie's, 11 January 1989, and 1783, when he inscribed the number "398" on Inv. no. 1982-104.
Signed on the verso, at lower left, in brown ink, "J: Cats"; inscribed above this, by the artist, in a darker shade of brown ink, "N 372 Gedagten naar opgaave van J .v D / in Maart"; below this, in another hand, in graphite, "-8 / 46"; at lower right center, also in graphite, "18"; and at lower right, in still another hand, also in graphite, "Lot 52 / B. White (all encircled)".
Watermark: Crown and letters "GR" within a half wreath, all inscribed within a circle.
Nieuwenhuys, C. J., 1799-1883, former owner.
Murray, Charles Fairfax, 1849-1919, former owner.
Morgan, J. Pierpont (John Pierpont), 1837-1913, former owner.
Collection J. Pierpont Morgan : Drawings by the Old Masters Formed by C. Fairfax Murray. London : Privately printed, 1905-1912, III, 240, repr.
Jane Shoaf Turner, with contributions by Felice Stampfle, Dutch Drawings in the Pierpont Morgan Library: Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries, New York, 2006, cat. no. 371.