Portrait of Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff (c. 1573-1609)

Entry

This painting was acquired as a portrait of Admiral Pieter Willemsz Verhoeff. His coat of arms is at top left: a raised arm holding a dagger above a horseshoe, with the initials of his Christian names flanking the crest. His function as admiral is alluded to in the seascape with ships on the right.

The portrait was regarded as an 18th-century copy when it was purchased by the museum.² The harsh execution and middling quality indeed suggests that it is a 17th- or 18th-century copy. At present, though, it is the only known version of the portrait. The prominent gold chain indicates that the original was executed in or shortly after 1607, for in that year the Amsterdam Board of Admiralty awarded Admiral Verhoeff the chain for his services at the Battle of Gibraltar.³

The biographical data conjure up a livelier picture of Verhoeff than his portrait suggests. In 1594, at the age of 21, he married Aechti Pieters in the Nieuwe Kerk in Amsterdam, with whom he had four daughters.⁴ The archives show that he sailed to Bergen that year, and that he was a lieutenant in 1601.⁵ After distinguishing himself as captain of the Aeolus in the Battle of Gibraltar in 1607, for which he was promoted to Vice-Admiral, the Dutch East India Company sent him to the Dutch East Indies on 22 December that year as admiral commanding a fleet of 13 ships.⁶ After rather unsuccessful actions against the Portuguese strongholds on Mozambique and Goa he arrived at Calicut in 1608, where he signed a treaty with the Zamorin ruler.⁷ In 1609 he arrived at the Banda Islands of the Indonesian archipelago with orders from the Dutch East India Company ‘to annex the islands for the Company (...), by treaty or force, before the 1st of September 1609 (...)’.⁸ The expedition failed miserably when he was ambushed by the Bandanese and killed along with 33 of his men. His headless corpse, riddled with stab wounds, was buried in the fortress of Banda Neira with full military honours.⁹

Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 409.