Man Fighting with a Lance, Seen from Behind / verso: Sketch of a Part of the Man’s Hat

Philips Wouwerman (Haarlem 1619 - Haarlem 1668)

He was born as the eldest son of the Reformed history painter Pouwels Joostensz Wouwermans (c. 1580/85-1642) and his fourth wife, Susanna van den Bogert (1591-in or after 1644), and was baptized in Haarlem on 24 May 1619.¹ His grandfather, Joost Philipsz Wouwerman (?-?), had emigrated from Flanders to Haarlem around 1580. It seems likely that Philips was initially trained by his father, who was called a painter of moderate kind (‘van geringe sort’) by Houbraken.² According to De Bie, Philips was an apprentice of Frans Hals (1582/83-1666),³ although their work has nothing in common. An apprenticeship with Pieter Cornelisz Verbeeck (c. 1600-1654) is suspected on stylistic grounds.

In 1638, Wouwerman travelled to Hamburg at the age of nineteen, against the will of his parents, to marry the Catholic girl Anna Pietersdr van Broeckhof (?-1670), and there he apparently worked with the now unknown local history painter Evert Decker (?-1647).⁴ By 1640 at the latest, Philips had returned to Haarlem, because he entered the Guild of St Luke on 4 September of that year and was elected to the office of warden in 1646. Between 1642 and 1655 he served in the Old or St George civic guard.

Apart from his journey to Hamburg, it seems that Wouwerman never travelled South, as was suggested by some.⁵ The influence of the Haarlem artist Pieter van Laer (1599-1642), who had returned from Rome in 1639, is evident in Wouwerman’s early works of around 1640. Although Houbraken reports that Wouwerman got hold of Van Laer’s drawings after the latter’s death in 1642 after a dispute between the two artists and that Wouwerman burned these (or his own drawings) on his deathbed some decades later,⁶ this anecdote must be doubted. Nevertheless, Van Laer’s influence on Wouwerman’s work is evident.

Wouwerman’s earliest dated picture is a Military Encampment with Soldiers Gambling of 1639 in a private collection⁷ Wouwerman is mainly known as a successful painter of equine subjects and depictions of horses in battles, hunts, riding schools, stables, forges and encampments, of which many have a genre-like character. He also produced some rural scenes, winter landscapes, marines, dune and beach landscapes. Wouwerman made several history pieces with religious subjects for Catholic patrons. His known oeuvre is very large. In his catalogue raisonné of 1908, Hofstede de Groot included over a thousand paintings, while Schumacher in her monograph of 2006 lists almost six hundred paintings. The few surviving drawings by his hand are usually considered independent works for the art market and lack a connection to known paintings.⁸ Despite the large output, Wouwerman maintained a stable level of quality throughout his oeuvre, but unfortunately only a fraction of his paintings is dated.

Philips’s two younger brothers, Pieter Wouwerman (1623-1682) and Jan Wouwerman (1629-1666), were also trained as painters⁹, and they were probably both at some point working in Philips’s workshop. Throughout his career, Wouwerman had several pupils. He paid, for example, for the apprenticeship of the now unknown artists Nicolaes Ficke (c. 1620-1702), Jacob Warnars (?-?) from Amsterdam and Kort Witholt (?-?) from Sweden in 1642, followed by Matthias Scheitz (c. 1625/30-c. 1700) from Hamburg in the late 1640s, Jan Verney (?-?) in 1653, and Antony de Haen (1640-in or before 1675?) and Hendrick Berckman (1629-1679) in 1656.

Wouwerman remained productive to the end of his life, with his last dated work, Grey Horse Standing in a Stable in a private collection (on loan to the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem),¹⁰ being executed in the year of his death. Wouwerman died on 19 May 1668 at the age of forty-two and was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk in Haarlem on the 23 May 1668.¹¹ His wife died two years later, leaving behind three adult daughters and three sons and a daughter, who were still minors. The sums of money mentioned in the deed dividing the estate among the children of 12 October 1670 indicate that the family must have lived in prosperity.¹² Their daughter Ledewina (1644/45-in or before 1678) married Henri de Fromantiou (1633/34-1693/1705), court painter of the Elector of Brandenburg, on 25 September 1672. Although Houbraken stated that she received a dowry of 20,000 guilders¹³, no archival evidence supports this and it seems unlikely, because the marriage took place four years after her father’s death. Wouwerman supplemented his income by speculating on the property market and dealing in art. However, there are also indications that he suffered bouts of poverty. For example, he is said to have painted his Conversion of St Hubert (1660), now in the collection of Lord Penrhyn at Penrhyn Castle, for the clandestine Sint-Bernarduskerk in Haarlem as thanks for the financial support he had received from the parish priest.¹⁴

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Wouwerman’s works were very sought after by aristocratic collectors, for example in St Petersburg, Dresden, The Hague and France, and fetched some of the highest prices for paintings from the Dutch Golden Age. This also motivated a lot of imitators, among them, for example, Pieter van Bredael (1629-1719) and his grandsons Jan Frans van Bredael (1686-1750) and Joseph van Bredael (1688-1739), Carel van Falens (1683-1733), Conrelis Vermeulen (1732-1813) and his son Andries Vermeulen (1763-1814) are known by name. Also, between the late 1650s or early 1660s and 1800, altogether some three hundred reproductive prints were made after Wouwerman’s paintings.¹⁵ The extensive trade and circulation of prints of his work led to the widespread production of drawn copies after his paintings. Those drawings directly related to his paintings, especially figure and compositional studies in red chalk, are now thought to be copies.¹⁶ His authentic drawings – often monogrammed and almost always executed in black chalk and grey wash – mirror the subject-matter of his paintings, but there is rarely, if ever, a direct link.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2019/Milou Goverde, 2020

References
T. Schrevelius, Harlemias, ofte, om beter te seggen. De eerste stichtinghe der stadt Haerlem, Haarlem 1648, p. 384; C. de Bie, Het gulden cabinet vande edele vry schilder-const, Antwerp 1661-62, pp. 281-82, 414; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, II (1719), pp. 70-75; A. van der Willigen, Les Artistes de Harlem: Notices historiques avec un précis sur la Gilde de St. Luc, Haarlem/The Hague 1870, pp. 336-40; F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis, 7 vols., Rotterdam 1877-90, VII (1890), pp. 118-26; A. Lichtwark, Matthias Scheits, als Schilderer des Hamburger Lebens, 1650-1700, Hamburg 1899, pp. 43-44; C. Hofstede de Groot (ed.), Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragenden holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, 10 vols., Esslingen 1907-28, II (1908), pp. 247-659; U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, XXXIV (1947), pp. 265-68; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lukasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1789, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, I, p. 260, 392; II, pp. 488, 491-92, 508-09, 514, 519, 535, 543, 546, 549, 613-14, 673, 934, 1031-32, 1039, 1041, 1060; F.J. Duparc, ‘Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668)’, Oud Holland 107 (1993), no. 3, pp. 257-86; B. Schumacher, Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668): The Horse Painter of the Golden Age, 2 vols., Doornspijk 2006 (Aetas aurea: Monographs on Dutch and Flemish Painting, vol. 20); P. Biesboer and N. Köhler (eds.), Painting in Haarlem, 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 355-63 (entry van I. van Thiel-Stroman); F. Duparc and Q. Buvelot (eds.), Philips Wouwerman (1619-1668), exh. cat. Kassel (Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel)/The Hague (Mauritshuis) 2009-10; Q. Buvelot and S. Alsteens, ‘A Rediscovered Drawing by Philips Wouwerman’, Master Drawings 51 (2013), no. 4, pp. 445-50; A. Stefes, ‘Did Philips Wouwerman Draw with Red Chalk?’, Master Drawings 57 (2019), no. 4, pp. 453-72