Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 116 cm × width 93.5 cm
outer size: depth 5.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Gerard van Honthorst
1655
oil on canvas
support: height 116 cm × width 93.5 cm
outer size: depth 5.5 cm (support incl. frame)
The plain-weave canvas support has been lined. Quite broad cusping is visible on all four sides. The ground layer is light coloured. In general, the paint was finely applied, with the use of impasto for the highlights.
Fair. Old tears are visible at the sitter’s elbow and below the table. The varnish is matte in places and discoloured.
...; from Adelaide J.P. Verlinde (1825-1915), widow of Walther W.B. Jansen (1820-82), Alem (near ’s-Hertogenbosch), fl. 1,000, as Self-Portrait and Portrait of Sophia Coopmans, to the museum, 1888;1 on loan to the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 1924-42
Object number: SK-A-1479
Copyright: Public domain
Gerard van Honthorst (Utrecht 1592 - Utrecht 1656)
Gerard van Honthorst was born in Utrecht on 4 November 1592 into a family of artists. His father, Herman Gerritsz van Honthorst, was a decorative painter and probably his first teacher. According to Von Sandrart and Houbraken, Honthorst trained with Abraham Bloemaert. When exactly he went to Italy is not known; a drawn copy after Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St Peter in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is dated 1616,2 indicating that he was in Rome by that year. His first documented painting, The Beheading of St John the Baptist, was executed for the Church of Santa Maria della Scala in 1617-18.3 Such Caravaggesque night scenes, which often include artificial sources of illumination, garnered Honthorst the nickname ‘Gherardo delle Notti’ in Italy. Among his Roman patrons were the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, in whose house Honthorst lived, and Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
A few months after his return to Utrecht in 1620, Honthorst married Sophia Coopmans. He joined the Guild of St Luke there and set up his own workshop. Von Sandrart, one of his apprentices in the 1620s, informs us that Honthorst had as many as 25 pupils at a time, from each of whom he received the sizable tuition fee of 100 guilders a year. With the exception of 1627, Honthorst served as dean of the guild between 1625 and 1630. It was also in the mid-1620s that he received his first commission from the court of Frederik Hendrik in The Hague.4 A commission from the British ambassador in The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, for Lord Arundel came as early as 16205 and eventually led to the invitation from Charles I to work on Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1628.6 Honthorst returned to the United Provinces the same year, but continued to work for the English court in the years to come. In 1630 he became court painter to the exiled King and Queen of Bohemia, Frederick V and Elizabeth, in The Hague. Honthorst also painted numerous portraits of the Stadholder and his wife, Amalia van Solms, and took part in the decoration of, among others, the palaces Honselaarsdijk, Huis ter Nieuburch (1636-39) and Huis ten Bosch (1649-50). In order to accommodate his work in The Hague, he set up a second workshop there in 1637 and joined the guild, serving as dean in 1640. Also in 1637, he became the principal artist to decorate the Banqueting Hall in Kronborg Castle for King Christian IV of Denmark. Honthorst was, perhaps, the most internationally successful Dutch artist of his time. Despite, or possibly as a result of this success, his late style was criticized as ‘stiff ’ and ‘slick’ (‘stijve gladdicheyt’) and he was esteemed a ‘much less great master than themselves’ (‘beaucoup moins grand maistre qu’eux’) by his fellow artists working on the Oranjezaal.7 He died on 27 April 1656 and was buried in the Catharijnekerk in Utrecht.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Mancini c. 1620, fol. 86 (Judson/Ekkart 1999, p. 47); Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 22, 102, 172-74; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 149-50; Braun 1966, pp. 7-59, 340-88 (documents); Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 276-79; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 382-83; Judson/Ekkart 1999, pp. XXXIII-XXXIV, 1-24
Although most of Honthorst’s portrait commissions came from courtly circles, he also produced bourgeois portraits throughout his career in the northern Netherlands.8 Not constrained by courtly decorum, the latter, of which this portrait pair of an artist (shown here) and his wife (see SK-A-1480) are prime examples, often show surprising originality. Honthorst used the conceit of portraying an artist in the act of making a portrait in two earlier works, which show women in the process of painting their husbands’ portraits.9
Executed in the year prior to his death, the sitters in this portrait pair have traditionally been identified as Honthorst himself and his wife Sophia Coopmans. The man’s age and the date of execution are inscribed on the canvas: he was 67 years old in 1655. Honthorst, however, was 63 years old in November of that year. This discrepancy prompted Braun to remove the paintings from Honthorst’s oeuvre, although the Portrait of a Woman is signed with monogram.10 Ekkart rightly accepts the portraits while showing that the sitters cannot possibly be the artist himself and his wife.11 Not only is the male sitter younger than Honthorst was at the time, he only superficially resembles Honthorst’s likeness as engraved by Pieter de Jode seven years earlier.12 It would also have been odd for Honthorst to portray himself as a draughtsman. Although her age is not recorded in any document, Sophia Coopmans was most likely older than the female sitter, whose age is given as 54. Another reason for rejecting the traditional identification of the sitters as Honthorst himself and his wife not pointed out by Ekkart is provided by the medallion hanging from the table, which bears the image of Queen Christina of Sweden and the legend ‘Christina’. As far as we know, Honthorst was never employed by Christina.
According to Bolten, the drawing held by the artist in the man’s portrait is based on a drawing in Edinburgh, identified by Andrews as a portrait of Abraham Bloemaert and attributed to Cornelis Visscher the Younger (c. 1628/29-58).13 The similarities between the two drawings are indeed striking; if the artist portrayed by Honthorst was responsible for the drawing in Edinburgh he cannot be identified as Cornelis Visscher the Younger who was much younger. Andrews’s identification of the man in the Edinburgh drawing as Abraham Bloemaert is also far from certain. According to an inscription on the drawing, the sitter was 87 years old in 1650, while Bloemaert was only 84 in that year. Moreover, the physiognomic similarities between the Edinburgh man and secure portraits of Bloemaert are not all that great.14
While it has not been possible to draw any conclusions, there are some clues as to the sitters’ identities. The dimensions and compositions of the portraits are quite similar to those of a signed portrait pair now in Berlin, also from 1655, showing a lawyer and his wife (figs. a-b). The Berlin pair, mistakenly identified as Honthorst’s parents, was auctioned with the collection of the part-time artist Walther Willem Boudewijn Jansen in 1891. The Rijksmuseum purchased its pair from Jansen’s widow a few years earlier. The couples in the Amsterdam and Berlin portraits were undoubtedly close relatives.15 While the sitters in these four portraits may have been Jansen’s ancestors, it is equally possible that he purchased the paintings, as he is known to have done with other portraits in his collection.16
The écorché on the table, a plaster cast after a bronze by Willem van Tetrode, was a common study model, and appears in a number of 17th-century paintings.17 Its presence in Honthorst’s painting, therefore, is of no help in identifying the sitter. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to identify the sculpture bust on the table behind the artist’s left arm. The medallion with Christina’s image, however, does give an indication that the artist should be sought among those employed by the Swedish queen.18
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. 141.
Judson/Ekkart 1999, pp. 39-41, 318, no. 488, p. 324, no. 516, with earlier literature; Blisniewski in Munich-Cologne 2002, p. 363, no. 149 (Portrait of an Artist only)
1903, p. 132, nos. 1231, 1232 (as Self-Portrait and Portrait of Sophia Coopmans); 1960, p. 142, no. 1231 (as Self-Portrait); 1976, p. 286, nos. A 1479, A 1480 (as Self-Portrait and Portrait of Sophia Coopmans); 2007, no. 141
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Gerard van Honthorst, Portrait of an Artist, 1655', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8761
(accessed 8 November 2024 22:52:31).