Portrait of Petronella Lievensdr van Roy (1542-1606)

Amsterdam, c. 1662 - c. 1663

Object data

leadpoint, with dark grey and black wash, on vellum

height 275 mm × width 197 mm

Inscriptions

inscribed by the artist: lower centre (in cartouche), in brown ink, Petronella van Roy Livini. / F[ilia]
inscribed on verso: lower centre, in pencil, 6
stamped on verso: lower left, with the mark of an unidentified collector (L. 1022a); lower centre, with the mark of the museum (L. 2228)

Condition

Slightly discoloured in the margins

Provenance

? Commissioned by Theodorus Kerckrinck (1638-93), Amsterdam and Hamburg, after 1661;¹ …; anonymous sale, The Hague (A.G. de Visser), 11 November 1875 sqq., no. 180, fl. 11.50;² …; sale, Johannes Marinus Vreeswijk (1839-1919, Utrecht), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 3 (4) May 1882 sqq., no. 289, fl. 69;³ …; from the dealer J.H. Balfoort, Utrecht, fl. 84,50, to the museum (L. 2228), 1883

Object number: RP-T-1883-A-237

Context

The artist

Johannes Thopas (Arnhem 1625 - probably Zaandam before 1695)

He grew up in Utrecht and Emmerich, where his mother’s second husband, Johannes Wijer (?-?), served as burgomaster. Thopas, who was born deaf, was probably self-taught. He does not feature in art-historical biographies from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But from the early twentieth century, he was the ‘most prolific of the great plumbago (leadpoint) artists of the Rembrandt period’ and a ‘master of chiaroscuro’ who managed to make the ‘characters of his sitters leap out at us.’⁴ Because of his deafness, he lived with family members his entire life and needed the help of a guardian in all official matters. He started to draw portraits while still in Utrecht in the mid-1640s, the earliest known examples being the Portrait of a Man and the Portrait of a Woman, each dated 1646, in the Frits Lugt Collection, Fondation Custodia, Paris (inv. nos. 1971-PM 4 and 1971-PM 5).⁵ His approach to portraiture followed the example set by Utrecht painters such as Jan van Bijlert (1597/98-1671).⁶ From circa 1656-57 to 1662, Thopas lived in Amsterdam. In the course of the 1660s, he moved to Haarlem, where he entered the Guild of St Luke in 1668. In 1672, he must have moved to Assendelft, and he probably spent the last years of his life in Zaandam, where his sister (and then caretaker) Jacoba Thopas (?-before 1695) drew up her will in 1688.

Despite the sheltered life Thopas led, as an artist he was sought after by the rich and influential. His oeuvre consists of more than sixty portrait drawings on vellum, including some commissioned by members of highly respected Dutch families. His last dated drawings is a pair from 1684, the Portrait of a Man and the Portrait of a Woman in the Victoria & Albert Museum, London (inv. nos. P.26-1952 and P.27-1952).⁷ There is only one known painting by the artist, Girl on her Deathbed in the Mauritshuis, The Hague (inv. no. 1159).⁸

Annemarie Stefes, 2018

References
W. Mills, ‘Dutch Plumbagos: The Clements Collection’, The Connoisseur 37 (1913), pp. 153-60 (esp. p. 155); R.E.O. Ekkart, Deaf, Dumb & Brilliant: Johannes Thopas, Master Draughtsman, exh. cat. Aachen (Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum)/Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2014, pp. 15-23

Entry

This drawing belongs to a genealogical set of family portraits probably commissioned by Theodorus Kerckrinck (1638-1693), son of an Amsterdam merchant, doctor of medicine and adviser to Cosimo III de’ Medici (1642-1723), Grand Duke of Tuscany. Kerckrinck was born to a family of Lübeck origins, studied in Leiden and lived in Amsterdam until he moved to Hamburg in the latter half of the 1670s. He probably ordered the drawings after the death of his father, Dirck Godertsz Kerckrinck (1604-1661), whose portrait by Thopas in the Albertina, Vienna (inv. no. 10273),⁹ shows him at a younger age and thus must have been copied from an older portrait. Nine drawings of this set are known today from originals or reproductions; five others are documented only by description.¹⁰ Originally, the series must have been twice as large.¹¹

Unlike most of Thopas’s other portrait drawings, each subject in the Kerckrinck set is framed by a drawn cartouche, consisting of a trompe l’oeil carved stone border of laurel, surrounded by an ornamental Auricular-style frame. The name of the sitter is inscribed in the panel below. Petronella Lievensdr van Roy, the subject of the present drawing, was born in ’s Hertogenbosch, and in January 1561 she married Willem Jansz van Loon (c. 1537-1618), a founder of the Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie; VOC). In 1577, ’s Hertogenbosch was taken over by the Catholics and the Van Loons escaped to Rotterdam, where Petronella died. The couple had four children. It was their granddaughter Cornelia Hessels (1586-1640), whose portrait is untraced,¹² who was linked with the Kerckrinck family, for she married Theodorus Kerckrinck’s grandfather Godert Kerckrinck (1577-1645).¹³

Since Petronella van Roy was dead decades before Thopas made the drawing, the artist must have based her likeness on an earlier portrait, whose whereabouts are unknown. Two painted copies by anonymous hands after this lost model are in the Museum van Loon, Amsterdam, having entered the collection through the family into which Petronella married. One (inv. no. 5), in oil on canvas of circa 1575, has conventional dimensions (67 x 57 cm),¹⁴ while the other (inv. no. Album Van Loon 197), dated circa 1675-1700, is roughly the same format as the present drawing (26 x 19.5 cm), with an equally elaborate border.¹⁵ Closely reflecting Thopas’s set of drawings, this tiny painting is part of a series laid down on paper and bound in a genealogical album.¹⁶

Annemarie Stefes, 2018

Literature

A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstlerlexikon, 3 vols., Vienna/Leipzig 1906-11, II, p. 710; M.D. Henkel, ‘Johan Thopas’, in U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXXIII (1939), p. 82; R.E.O. Ekkart, Deaf, Dumb & Brilliant: Johannes Thopas, Master Draughtsman, exh. cat. Aachen (Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum)/Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2014, pp. 68, 120, no. 30 (fig. 29)

Citation

A. Stefes, 2018, 'Jan Thopas, Portrait of Petronella Lievensdr van Roy (1542-1606), Amsterdam, c. 1662 - c. 1663', in J. Turner (ed.), Dutch Drawings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200144590

(accessed 11 December 2025 07:13:34).