Portrait of Maria van Oosterwijck (1630-1693)

1671

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 96 cm × width 77.8 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, bottom left: W vaillant 1671

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been removed. Cusping is present on all sides, but only very faintly visible at the bottom.
Preparatory layers The single, greyish-brown ground extends up to the current edges of the canvas. It contains white, black and earth pigments.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the current edges of the canvas. The composition was built up from the back to the front, without the use of reserves, and from dark to light. Whereas the face and hands were delicately rendered, the dress was brushed in freely, in part with very bold, even crude touches and contours. The paint was predominantly applied in opaque colours, wet in wet, except for the red and blue glazes over the chair and the ribbons of the dress. Under the ribbons fluid dark lines, possibly part of an initial sketch in paint, and red underpaint are visible. The paint layer is quite smooth, with textured brushstrokes only in the flesh colours and dress, adding to the modelling. A few accents, details and dark contours were placed lastly. X-radiography revealed that the sitter was first depicted in a painting pose, with her right arm stretched out towards an easel and her hand, holding a brush, tried in two different positions. In its final, lowered, version, some further adjustments were made, which have become visible to the naked eye. The arm was broader at first and the position of the fingers was slightly altered. The palette was initially smaller, as can also be seen. In the niche in the left background a red form is present under the paint surface, very faintly noticeable, which is probably the underpainting for a flower that was never executed.
Willem de Ridder, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: W. de Ridder, RMA, nos. SK-A-1292/1-2, 4 March 2008
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 4 March 2008
infrared photography: W. de Ridder, RMA, 5 March 2008
X-radiography: J. van der Brugge-Mulder, RMA, nos. SK-A-1292/A1-2, B1-2, 7 August 2019

Condition

Fair. There are several losses and some abrasion throughout. The blue glazes of the ribbons have faded. The varnish is discoloured.

Conservation

H.H. Mertens, 1961: canvas lined
H. Plagge, 1961: restored

Provenance

…; collection Pieter verLoren van Themaat (1830-1885), Utrecht;¹ his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller et al.), 30 October 1885, no. 98, fl. 569.25, to De Vries, for the museum²

Object number: SK-A-1292

The artist

Wallerant Vaillant (Lille 1623 - Amsterdam 1677)

Wallerant Vaillant was born in Lille on 30 May 1623 to Jean Vaillant and Marie Warlop. He was brought up in that southern Netherlandish city, where his father worked in the silk industry. He trained as a painter in Antwerp with Erasmus Quellinus II, who received payment of 150 guilders for a year’s tuition on 17 September 1639. The family moved to Amsterdam in 1642.

Vaillant did not confine his activities to the Amsterdam market. In 1647 and 1675 he paid the admission fee to the Guild of St Luke in Middelburg, probably to enable him to ply his trade there, or perhaps so that he could deal in art. However, it is not known whether he lived in Zeeland or commuted between Amsterdam and Middelburg. He is known to have resided in Germany for a while, where he was active at the court of Prince Rupert of the Rhine in Heidelberg between 1655 and 1658. It was probably there that he first encountered the mezzotint, a new graphic technique which he brought to the Dutch Republic in the mid-1660s with great success. During his time in Germany he made various portrait prints of European aristocrats such as Karl Ludwig, Elector Palatine, his sister Sophia and Emperor Leopold I. Vaillant and his half-brother Bernard attended the latter’s coronation in Frankfurt in 1658. He moved to Paris the following year and remained there until around 1665. Cardinal Mazarin introduced him at the court of Louis XIV, and he made several pastel likenesses of French aristocrats, among them the Sun King himself, his wife Maria Theresa of Spain, the former French queen consort Anne of Austria and her son Philippe d’Orléans.

After these sojourns abroad Vaillant returned to Amsterdam, probably around 1666-67, where he established himself firmly in the market for portraits, drawing his clients mainly from among the city’s rich middle class. Most of his paintings date from the last decade of his life. A document of 1668 states that he was also a picture dealer. Contemporary approval of his work is shown by Von Sandrart’s praise of his mezzotints, but he also wrote that he received it ‘for his good painting of histories and modern scenes, as well as portraits’.³ Vaillant was buried in the Waalse Kerk in Amsterdam on 2 September 1677, unmarried and childless.

Vaillant’s painted oeuvre consists of almost 50 works, mainly portraits, but also a few self-portraits, heads, still lifes and genre scenes. His earliest dated picture is the Still Life with a Pheasant of 1652,⁴ but there was already a documented commission for a likeness of Jan Six in 1649.⁵ He painted his last dated work, Portrait of a Young Woman, in 1676.⁶ His own inventions in his mezzotints are mainly portraits and still lifes, but in his copies after northern, Flemish and Italian masters he tackled every genre. Wallerant Vaillant taught his brothers Jacques (1643-1691) and Jean (1627-before 1680), and his half-brother André (1655-1693), all of whom were active as painters and engravers.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024

References
J. von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675: Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. A.R. Peltzer, Munich 1925 (ed. princ. Nuremberg 1675), pp. 264, 300, 351; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, II, Amsterdam 1719, pp. 102-04; J.E. Wessely, Wallerant Vaillant: Verzeichniss seiner Kupferstiche und Schabkunstblätter, Vienna 1865, pp. V-VI; F.J.P. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, Antwerp 1883, pp. 791-92; A. Bredius, ‘Italiaansche schilderijen in 1672, door Amsterdamsche en Haagsche schilders beoordeeld’, Oud Holland 4 (1886), pp. 41-46, esp. p. 42; O. Granberg, ‘Une revue d’art du XVIIe siecle’, ibid., pp. 268-71; A.A. Vorsterman van Oyen, ‘Genealogie van het geslacht Vaillant’, 1892 offprint from Stam- en wapenboek van aanzienlijke Nederlandsche familiën, III, The Hague 1890, pp. 3-7, esp. p. 3; A. Bredius, ‘Het schildersregister van Jan Sysmus, Stads-Doctor van Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 12 (1894), pp. 160-71, esp. p. 166; M. Vandalle, ‘Les frères Vaillant, artistes lillois du XVIIe siècle’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 7 (1937), pp. 341-60, esp. pp. 347-51; Boon in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXIV, Leipzig 1940, pp. 41-42; N. Rogeaux, Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677), graveur à la manière noire, dessinateur à la pierre noire et peintre de portraits, diss., Université Paris IV-Sorbonne 1999, pp. 23-69, 687-730 (documents); N. Rogeaux, ‘Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677): Portraitiste à la pierre noire et au pastel’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 143 (2001), no. 1595, pp. 251-66

Entry

Maria van Oosterwijck is one of the best-known seventeenth-century female painters, and one of the very few who could live from their art. She specialized in flower still lifes, of which some 30 survive. Her first dated work is from as late as 1667, when she was 37, but by then she had already made an international name for herself. On 2 December of that year Cosimo III de’ Medici said that her still lifes were at least as good as Willem van Aelst’s.⁷ Around 1668 Emperor Leopold I bought her Religious Still Life,⁸ and in 1669 Cosimo III de’ Medici purchased two of her paintings on his second visit to the Netherlands.⁹ Wallerant Vaillant’s 1671 portrait of her is confirmation of her professional position as well as being one of the finest works he ever produced.¹⁰

Here Vaillant employed a direct manner of execution, with painterly decisions often being taken while he was working.¹¹ The present canvas is related to several elegant three-quarter-length portraits of women made after Vaillant’s return from Germany and France to Amsterdam around 1666-67. One feature they have in common is the delicately brushed arms and heads, while the handling in the light-coloured clothing is much looser.¹² Vaillant’s likeness of Van Oosterwijck is his only known painting of a woman in which the model is seated. It shares elements with his mezzotint after a self-portrait by Caspar Netscher,¹³ such as the figure’s position within the picture, the three-quarter-length format, the clear allusion to the sitter’s profession in the shape of the palette and brushes, and the curtain in the background.

In contrast to a work such as the portrait of a female painter of around 1675-85 attributed to Michiel van Musscher, in which both the artist and art are praised by personifications and allegorical accessories,¹⁴ Van Oosterwijck’s is restrained and has only a few references to her profession. It is possible that Vaillant originally planned to place a bloom in the indistinct niche in the left background, because there are traces in this area of a tulip-shaped red underpainting. Although that motif may have been intended as an allusion to Van Oosterwijck’s specialization, flowers are not uncommon in Vaillant’s portraits of women. The unidentified book on her lap has been interpreted as an edition of Karel van Mander’s 1604 Schilder-boeck,¹⁵ but it is more likely to be a Bible, stressing her virtuous and pious nature.¹⁶ Van Oosterwijck, who never married, came from a family of theologians. Her father, Jacobus van Oosterwijck, was a minister, and in 1658 her brother Lambertus went to study theology in Leiden, where she lived with him for several years. Her reputation for piety followed her into the early eighteenth century, when Houbraken described her as ‘chaste and extremely devout’.¹⁷ Her still lifes, in which she incorporated many religious symbols, also show that faith as well as art played an important part in her life.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

A. Czobor, ‘Ein Bildnis André Vaillants von Wallerant Vaillant’, Oud Holland 73 (1958), pp. 242-46, esp. p. 244; N. Rogeaux, Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677), graveur à la manière noire, dessinateur à la pierre noire et peintre de portraits, diss., Université Paris IV-Sorbonne 1999, pp. 54, 221, 222, 464-65, no. P26, with earlier literature; N. Rogeaux, ‘Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677), portraitiste hollandais’, Revue du Nord 84 (2002), pp. 25-49, esp. pp. 41, 43

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 171, no. 1458; 1903, p. 264, no. 2341; 1976, p. 552, no. A 1292

Citation

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024, 'Wallerant Vaillant, Portrait of Maria van Oosterwijck (1630-1693), 1671', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5622

(accessed 23 November 2024 04:42:46).