Object data
oil on panel
support: height 76.8 cm × width 106.6 cm
frame: height 96 cm × width 125.8 cm
sight size: height 75 cm × width 104.9 cm
Pieter Lastman
Christ and the Woman of Canaan (Matthew 15:21-21; Mark 7:24-30)
1617
Inscriptions
- signature and date, with ligated monogram lower left, with ligated monogram: PL / 1617
Technical notes
The support is a single, horizontally grained oak panel bevelled on all sides. A white ground layer and brown imprimatura are visible. The paint layers have been thinly applied in the sky and architecture, and more thickly in the principal figures. Pentimenti indicate that the head of the bald man pointing to the woman from Canaan, and the book held by the figure on the far right, were originally larger.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 23 September 2002
Condition
Fair. There is a knot in the upper right of the panel and a piece of wood has been inserted into the panel at the lower left. The cracks at these points in the panel are old and stable, but the retouched areas here have discoloured. The sky is abraded and contains a number of small losses.
Conservation
- H. Kat, 1991: crack at upper left and paint around it consolidated
Provenance
...; from the Beggi Gallery, Florence, fl. 900, to the museum, through the mediation of the Vereniging Rembrandt, October 1890;1 on loan to the Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, since 2004
Object number: SK-A-1533
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
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
Entry
While travelling with his disciples, Christ was beseeched by a woman of Canaan to cure her daughter, who was ‘grievously vexed with a devil’. Christ refused her entreaties, saying ‘I am not sent but unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel’. When the woman persisted, Christ responded metaphorically, ‘It is not meet to take the children’s bread, and to cast it to dogs’, whereupon the woman of Canaan replied ‘Truth Lord, yet the dogs eat of the crumbs which fall from their master’s table’. Persuaded by the woman’s faith, Christ made her daughter ‘whole’.
While the metaphorical dogs had been included in earlier depictions of the subject,8 Lastman’s painting also includes the children eating bread. The crowd entering through a triumphal arch on the left, which includes a man being transported in a wheelbarrow, undoubtedly represents the sick whom Christ healed throughout his travels. Astrid Tümpel has suggested that the figure slightly removed from the main protagonists on the right and holding a large book should be identified as St Matthew, the author of the gospel in which the story of the woman of Canaan is told.9 It is more likely, however, that he represents one of the Pharisees or scribes, who are criticized by Christ for adhering to the old law instead of embracing the pure faith that he represents.10 In the same verse of Matthew in which the story of the woman of Canaan is related, Christ calls the Pharisees and scribes ‘Ye hypocrites, well did Esaias prophesy of you, saying, This people draweth nigh unto me with their mouth, and honoureth me with their lips; but their heart is far from me’ (Matthew 15:7-8). While the truly faithful enter through the gate on the left in Lastman’s picture, the Pharisee or scribe stands somewhat apart on the right. The contrast between him and the woman of Canaan in both Matthew’s gospel and the present painting is that although being one of Christ’s people he is faithless, while the woman of Canaan is not a member of the house of Israel, but has great faith.
The main figures are arranged in a semi-circle on a narrow plane in the foreground, a not unusual compositional formula for Lastman. Also typical of the artist are the alternating bands of light and shade, which create a sense of perspective and differentiate secondary figures from primary ones. The Roman architecture adds to the definition of space and sets the scene in the ancient world of the Bible. The tower behind Christ accentuates his central role, and the fact that it is a ruin was probably intended as another contrast between pure faith and the old law. A circular temple adds emphasis to the caesura between the main scene and the figure of the Pharisee or scribe. The background figures are unusually small for Lastman. On the other hand, the children in the left foreground are disproportionately large. Typical for a part of Lastman’s oeuvre, the figures are clad in heavy garments with thick folds. The myriad crisp and angular folds which play such a large role in compositions like Orestes and Pylades Disputing at the Altar (SK-A-2354) are not in evidence here. Lastman used the head of the woman of Canaan again for the figure of Manoah’s wife in his 1624 Sacrifice of Manoah (fig. a).11 A rather disagreeable, though faithful, copy of the present painting was auctioned in Cologne in 1999 with an incorrect attribution to Lastman himself.12
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. 168.
Literature
Freise 1911, p. 59; Saxl 1920; Van der Meij-Tolsma 1988, pp. 35-36; Tümpel in Amsterdam 1991a, pp. 104-05, no. 10
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 156, no. 1429; 1934, p. 161, no. 1426; 1960, p. 168, no. 1426; 1976, p. 338, no. A 1533; 2007, no. 168
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Pieter Lastman, Christ and the Woman of Canaan (Matthew 15:21-21; Mark 7:24-30), 1617', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.12109
(accessed 22 November 2024 16:29:29).