Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 81.5 cm × width 66.5 cm
outer size: depth 8 cm (support incl. frame)
Jan van Bijlert
c. 1650
oil on canvas
support: height 81.5 cm × width 66.5 cm
outer size: depth 8 cm (support incl. frame)
The moderately fine, plain-weave canvas support has been lined. Broad cusping is visible on the left and right sides and at the top. The support was, perhaps, reduced at the bottom after being lined. The cusping here is shallow and the figure's hand and the fan continue over the bottom edge of the stretcher. The ground is light in colour. The paint layers have been applied smoothly, with very little visible brushmarking, and little use of impasto.
Fair. There is a narrow, horizontal impression at the height of the figure's neck that has been made by the stretcher. The paint layers, especially in the figure's face, are abraded. The varnish is quite discoloured.
...; from the dealer, B. Kalf, Amsterdam, fl. 130, to the museum, April 1893;1 on loan to the Centraal Museum, Utrecht, 1924-42; on loan to the Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, Amsterdam, since 1956
Object number: SK-A-1596
Copyright: Public domain
Jan van Bijlert (Utrecht c. 1597/98 - Utrecht 1671)
Jan van Bijlert was probably born in 1597 or 1598, as he stated that he was 27 years old in a prenuptial agreement drawn up in May 1625. His father, Herman Beerntsz van Bijlert (c. 1566 - before 1615), was an Utrecht glass-painter and most likely his son’s first teacher. According to Von Sandrart, Van Bijlert was apprenticed to Abraham Bloemaert. Von Sandrart also reports that he travelled to France and Italy. Van Bijlert probably embarked on this voyage in 1616 or 1617, while the first documentary evidence for his stay in Rome dates from 1621, at which point he was living in the parish of Sta. Maria del Popolo. In Rome, he was most probably a member of the Schildersbent (Band of Painters), going under the nickname ‘Aeneas’. There are no extant paintings from this period. Van Bijlert returned to his native city in 1624, as evidenced by his earliest dated painting, St Sebastian Attended by Irene,2 a work that was very probably painted there. He married Margrieta Kemings the following year. On the basis of his religious paintings with an explicit, Catholic iconography, it has sometimes been assumed that Van Bijlert was a Catholic. However, although he was recorded as communicato (i.e. Catholic) in Rome in 1621, his 1625 marriage took place in the Reformed Church, his children were baptized in the Reformed Church, and he himself became a member of the Reformed Church in 1630. It was only in 1630 that Van Bijlert joined the Guild of St Luke in Utrecht, serving as dean between 1632 and 1637, again in 1654, and as warden in 1655. Between 1667 and 1670, he served alternately in both capacities. Before 1630, he had probably been a member of the glass-painters’ guild. In 1634, Van Bijlert became a regent of the confraternity that ran St Job’s Hospice, a hospital treating patients with venereal diseases and an almshouse for old men. Later, in 1642, he became the principal of this charitable organization. After the death of his first wife in 1657, he remarried Cecilia van Gelove in 1660. Van Bijlert became active in the paint-selling business she took over from her first husband. Jan van Bijlert died in Utrecht in November 1671.
Van Bijlert executed history and genre paintings and was, after Gerard van Honthorst’s move to The Hague in 1637 and Paulus Moreelse’s death in 1638, the principal portraitist in Utrecht. His Caravaggesque style of the 1620s gradually gave way to a more classicizing style with a brighter palette, clear lighting and sharp modelling. In the 1630s he also painted genre scenes with small figures, influenced by the work of Jacob Duck, while Van Poelenburch’s style is evident in a few of his history paintings with small figures. His known oeuvre comprises approximately 200 works, only 14 of which are dated. Among his patrons were Utrecht burgomasters and nobles, such as the Strick van Linschoten family. Works from his hand had entered the collections of Stadholder Frederik Hendrik and the Winter King, Frederick V, in the early 1630s. His pupils included Bertram de Fouchier (1609-73), Abraham Willaerts (c. 1613-69), Ludolf de Jongh (1616-79) and Mattheus Wytmans (c. 1650-89).
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
De Bie 1661, p. 118; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 177; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 235; Muller 1880, pp. 24, 149; Van Eelde 1897; Moes in Thieme/Becker V, 1911, p. 315; Bredius 1935d; Hoogewerff 1965, pp. 3-5; Bok 1984, pp. 31-42; Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 194-96; Wegener in Saur X, 1995, pp. 636-37; Huys Janssen 1998, pp. 35-52, 205-17 (documents)
Of the approximately 200 paintings in Van Bijlert’s oeuvre, 48 are portraits. That the sitter in the present half-length portrait was a widow, as Huys Janssen has described her, or at least in mourning is suggested primarily by the cap she wears. This pointed black cap, a widow’s peak, was a costume element often, but not exclusively, worn by widows and women in mourning.3 Another indication that the woman may be in mourning is the fact that, other than the golden ‘ear-iron’ (oorijzer) used to hold her cap in place, she does not wear any jewellery. Fans of black ostrich feathers, such as the one held by the woman in this portrait, also feature in portraits of married women, and are, therefore, not necessarily indicative of the sitter’s marital status.
The neckerchief worn by the woman indicates that Huys Janssen’s dating of the present painting to around 1640 should be pushed up by about ten years. The sharp contour lines, rather light background, and the lack of impasto and visible brushstrokes make this painting one of Van Bijlert’s most classicizing portraits.
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. 21.
Huys Janssen 1994, pp. 226-27, no. 164; Huys Janssen 1998, p. 168, no. 182, with earlier literature
1903, p. 69, no. 670; 1976, p. 159, no. A 1596; 2007, no. 21
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Jan van Bijlert, Portrait of a Woman, c. 1650', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7435
(accessed 23 September 2024 00:38:44).