Portrait of a Woman

Entry

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 (see SK-A-1479) and his wife (shown here) 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. 142.