Bust of Johannes Munter (1611-1685), Burgomaster of Amsterdam

Entry

The marble portrait bust that burgomaster Johannes Munter (1611-1685) commissioned from Bartholomeus Eggers (1637-1692) in 1672/73 marks the close of an imposing series of Amsterdam regental portraits made by the sculptor and his teacher, Artus Quellinus I (1609-1668). Eggers devised his portrait of the rotund regent – who by this time had already fulfilled his first term as burgomaster and was subsequently chosen to serve the same function an additional six times – in austere fashion, void of baroque flair and pathos. Even so, he failed to match the refinement of Quellinus’s portraits. Munter is frontally portrayed in a static pose. With the detail of the left hand playing with the tassels of his collar, Eggers introduced a new, playful motif in the Amsterdam tradition of burgomasters’ busts. In doing so, he bestowed a liveliness on this otherwise severe portrayal, with the painted portraits of his day likely being the source of his innovation. Another dynamic aspect of Eggers’s style is the undercutting of the eyelids, employed to create a small shadow falling over the eyeballs. A Latin inscription on the block-shaped socle – a detail also found on Quellinus’s portrait of burgomaster Andries de Graeff (BK-18305) – identifies the sitter as ‘consul’ of Amsterdam.

Bartholomeus Eggers was among the talented young sculptors Quellinus recruited to assist him with the sculptural decoration of the Amsterdam former town hall (the present-day Royal Palace at Dam Square) then under construction. Like his master, Eggers originated from Antwerp, where he worked as an apprentice in the workshop of Quellinus, which was run by his brother-in-law Pieter Verbruggen during the former’s Amsterdam period. Bartholomeus was active in Amsterdam from 1654 on, together with his brother Jacob, who was himself a sculptor. When Quellinus drew up his testament in that same year, the two brothers acted as witnesses. Bartholomeus Eggers probably continued working in Quellinus’s Amsterdam workshop until 1663, as it was not until this year that he registered himself as an independent sculptor in the local guild of St Luke. It was also in this year that Eggers acquired his first commission from Frederick William, Great Elector of Brandenburg, who would repeatedly approach the sculptor for numerous projects in the future. Consequently, much of Eggers’s documented oeuvre is today preserved in Germany – not to mention Poland and Russia – and therefore difficult to trace. Somewhere between 1663 and 1666, Eggers carved his first bust of an Amsterdam burgomaster: Gerard Schaep van Cortenhoeff (BK-C-2012-1).² In this same period, Eggers also executed work for a second princely patron, one closely affiliated with the stadholder’s court in The Hague: Count Johan Maurits, Prince of Nassau-Siegen, builder of the Mauritshuis. Eggers’s masterpiece of 1664-65 – a half-length portrait bust commissioned by and depicting the count – initially stood in the garden of the Mauritshuis but was later moved to the count’s Fürstengruft in the German city of Siegen.³ This imposing princely bust can be deemed a successful rendition of Quellinus’s ruler portraits, such as the half-length busts of Duke Frederick III of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorf and his wife (Dom, Schleswig), and that of the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, Lopez de Bernavides, Marquis of Caracena, from 1664 (Antwerp, Museum of Fine Arts).

Frits Scholten, 2025