Object data
oil on panel
support: height 40.3 cm × width 31.5 cm
frame: height 60 cm × width 50.5 cm
sight size: height 40 cm × width 31 cm
Pieter Lastman
c. 1612
oil on panel
support: height 40.3 cm × width 31.5 cm
frame: height 60 cm × width 50.5 cm
sight size: height 40 cm × width 31 cm
The support is a single, horizontally grained oak panel bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1599. The panel could have been ready for use by 1610, but a date in or after 1616 is more likely. The paint layers were either applied directly onto the support, or there is a thin white ground. Except for a little bit of yellow pigment used for the flames of the fire in the middleground, the painting was executed in shades of black and white.
Fair. The figure of Isaac, the angel and the sky are heavily abraded. Areas of retouching in the sky and the varnish have discoloured.
...; sale, Johan van der Marck Aegidiusz (1707-72, Leiden), Amsterdam (H. de Winter et al.), 25 August 1773, no. 159 (‘Abrahams Offerhande, op Paneel, L. 15 ¼ b. 12 ½ duim [39.2 x 32 cm]. Men ziet den Gelovigen Aardsvader bereid zynen zoon Isaak, die zich bereids op de houtstapel gereed vertoond, te offeren in welk voornemen hy door een Engel wederhouden word. Verders twee vliegende kindertjes en een Ram, die zich van tusschen de struiken op doet en verder bywerk, op de Voorgrond, fraay in’t graauw geschilderd.’), fl. 16, to J. Yver;...; ? sale, Susanna Louisa Huygens (1714-85), The Hague (auction house not known), 22 May 1786, no. 19 (‘Abrahams Offerhande, kragtig en uitvoerig, door P. Lastman’), fl. 9.10, to Van Diest;...; donated to the museum by Dr Abraham Bredius (1855-1946), The Hague, 22 February 1887;1 on loan to the Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, since 1917
Object number: SK-A-1359
Credit line: Gift of A. Bredius, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
Pieter Lastman (Amsterdam c. 1583 - Amsterdam 1633)
Pieter Lastman was born in Amsterdam around 1583 into a well-to-do Catholic family. His father, Pieter Segersz, worked as a messenger for the city of Amsterdam and the orphans’ court until he was removed from office after the Alteration of 26 May 1578 because of his religious beliefs. Lastman’s mother, Barbara Jacobsdr, was an official appraiser and second-hand dealer, undoubtedly of art works among other items. Her career and that of one of Lastman’s uncles, who was a goldsmith, probably influenced Lastman’s own choice of career. According to Van Mander, he was apprenticed as a youth to Gerrit Pietersz, a pupil of Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem. Lastman’s earliest dated works, three drawings from 1601 and 1603,2 are clearly indebted to Pietersz’s Mannerist style. Van Mander also informs us that Lastman was in Italy at the time he was writing his Schilder-boeck, that is around 1600-03. Financially freed by an inheritance from his father, who had his last will drawn up in June 1602, Lastman probably left for Italy not long thereafter. Houbraken reports that he was in Italy in 1605, and a drawing by Lastman with a view of the Palatine Hill is inscribed ‘Roma 1606’.3 Another drawing by Lastman, a copy of Veronese’s Adoration of the Shepherds in SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, indicates that he also visited that city.4 The brightly coloured, small-sized cabinet pictures of Adam Elsheimer, in particular, were influential for Lastman’s multifigured history paintings. Other important influences from his Roman sojourn include Caravaggio, whose naturalistic rendering of figures, and sometimes his compositions too, are echoed in Lastman’s paintings. Lastman also carefully studied the art of Raphael and his school, later translating their monumental frescoes into easel paintings on a much smaller scale.
By March 1607 he had returned to Amsterdam, where he is recorded as one of the buyers at Gillis van Coninxloo’s sale. His first dated painting, an Adoration of the Magi, is from the following year, 1608.5 Lastman was the foremost artist of the group of painters who have come to be known as the Pre-Rembrandtists. His history paintings, featuring subjects taken from the Bible, secular history and mythology, a great number of which had never previously been depicted, or if so only in the graphic arts, often formed the starting point for the artists in his immediate circle. His most well-known pupils were Lievens and Rembrandt, who trained with him in 1619 and 1624 respectively. Only two commissions of works from Lastman are known: the design for a window in the Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam from the goldsmiths’ guild, executed in 1611,6 and three paintings executed in 1619 for Christian IV of Denmark’s private chapel in Frederiksborg Castle.7 Lastman was buried a bachelor in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam on 8 April 1633.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 207v; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 97-102, 214; Dudok van Heel 1975; Dudok van Heel 1991a; Tümpel 1991a; Broos in Turner 1996, XVIII, pp. 817-20; Dudok van Heel 2006, pp. 53-123
As has often been pointed out in the literature, the motif of Abraham abruptly turning his head towards the angel, as well as the angel himself in the present painting were adopted in reverse from Caravaggio’s second version of St Matthew and the Angel.8 The circular patterns of the drapery worn by Caravaggio’s angel must have impressed Lastman, who outfitted his in a similar fashion. The convoluted, twirling folds are continued in the drapery worn by Abraham and Isaac, and through to the partially unravelled turban at the bottom of the composition. The relief-like left side of the painting is complemented by the small view of a very deep landscape with a remarkably low horizon line on the right. The emphasis on surface pattern, as well as the significantly smaller dimensions of the Rijksmuseum painting, lends Lastman’s composition a very different effect from Caravaggio’s monumental work. Although the latter is one of Caravaggio’s few paintings with a landscape setting, the notion that his Sacrifice of Isaac9 also served as a model for the present painting is misplaced.10
Except for a small amount of yellow pigment used for the flames of the fire in the middleground, the palette is limited to shades of black and white. It seems unlikely that the painting was meant to serve as a preparatory sketch for a larger composition. It might, however, have been intended as a preparatory sketch for an engraving.
Freise indicated a dating for the present painting prior to 1616, as he catalogued it before Lastman’s other version of the theme in the Louvre, which is from that year.11 The dating to around 1612 advanced by Christian Tümpel (without comment, however) can be supported.12 The loose manner of painting can be compared to the 1613 St John the Evangelist on Patmos (fig. a), which has similar dimensions. The angel and Isaac’s rather delicate facial features also support a relatively early dating in Lastman’s oeuvre. While the dendrochronology indicates that a somewhat later date would be more plausible, it does not rule out the possibility that the painting could be from around 1612.13 The role played by the present painting as a model for compositions by Rembrandt and Lievens has often been commented upon in the literature.14
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements
This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 166.
Freise 1911, pp. 34-35, no. 10; Bruyn 1970, p. 40; Tümpel 1991b, pp. 65-66
1887, p. 99, no. 827; 1903, p. 156, no. 1425; 1976, p. 338, no. A 1359; 2007, no. 166
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Pieter Lastman, The Sacrifice of Abraham (Genesis 22:10-12), c. 1612', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7275
(accessed 22 November 2024 20:16:50).