Self-Portrait

Northern Netherlands, c. 1655

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 29.6 cm × width 25.5 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.7 cm thick on the left and approx. 1.2 cm on the right. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1625. The panel could have been ready for use by 1636, but a date in or after 1642 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends over the edges of the support. The first, beige-grey layer consists of white pigment particles varying in size, with an addition of black, orange and earth pigment particles. The second, light brown ground contains earth pigments and some white and fine orange pigment particles.
Underdrawing Infrared photography and infrared reflectography revealed some thin lines in what appears to be a dry medium, indicating the folds of the sitter’s doublet and delineating the windowsill and the shadow falling across it.
Paint layers The paint extends over the edges of the support. The translucent brown initial lay-in has remained visible, for instance in the sleeve. The composition was built up from dark to light leaving the sitter and curtain mostly in reserve. The face has been worked up from dark to light on a grey undermodelling. Infrared reflectography revealed some changes to the hands, suggesting that the right one was initially not visible, being placed behind the windowsill, while the left first held the print at the right edge. The print was executed with a thin brush and dark brown-grey paint over a lighter grey; fine, bright orange-red brushstrokes were added to its edges in the final stage. The window frame was applied wet in wet with different shades of grey and brown. The paint surface is smooth throughout.
Anna Krekeler, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 8 December 2011
paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-1638/1-2, 8 December 2011
technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 8 December 2011
infrared reflectography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 8 December 2011
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 June 2012

Condition

Fair. The varnish is extremely thick, has yellowed severely and saturates poorly, especially in the dark areas. Two scratches are visible to the right of the head. Parts of the background display a greyish haze.

Provenance

…; donated by the dealer Franz Kleinberger, Paris, through the mediation of the Director of the Koninklijk Kabinet van Schilderijen, The Hague, to the museum, as Dutch School, mid-17th century, Portrait of a Painter, January 1896¹

Object number: SK-A-1638

Credit line: Gift of F. Kleinberger, Paris

The artist

Pieter van Egmondt (Leiden c. 1614/22 - Leiden in or after 1664)

Pieter van Egmondt was long known only from records in archives and auction catalogues, but in the late twentieth century several signed works of his surfaced and new biographical information about the artist was unearthed, enabling a partial reconstruction of his oeuvre.²

His name is first found in a Leiden tax register of 1622, in which he is mentioned as the son of a prosperous silk merchant and his second wife. Since his father became betrothed to her on 14 January 1614, Pieter could not have been born earlier than that year, which puts his date of birth somewhere between 1614 and 1622. However, as he was documented as a painter at the time of his engagement to Maria Sluijtenburchs of Leiden on 30 November 1639, Van Egmondt was probably born closer to 1614 than 1622.

Van Egmondt must therefore have trained in the 1630s, but it is not known with whom. Although he is registered as a painter as early as 1639, it was not until 1661 that he paid his admission fee to the Guild of St Luke in Leiden. An entry in its archives mentions that he had then been active as an artist ‘for many years’. According to a notarized document of 6 January 1649 he also worked as a merchant, probably in the cloth trade like his father and brother. On 7 March 1650 Van Egmondt and his family were declared bankrupt with joint arrears of at least 30,000 guilders. Some of his debts were settled in 1654 and 1656. His wife Maria would already have been dead by then, for on 18 February 1656 he married Anna Leupen. The last time Van Egmondt’s name appears in the records was on 3 February 1664, when a child of his was baptized. His death is listed in an undated guild register from after 1663, possibly only shortly afterwards.

Mentions of his name in old inventories and sale catalogues suggest that Van Egmondt mainly produced genre scenes. Only a small number of surviving paintings can be attributed to him, and not one of them is dated.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2022

References
A. Bredius, ‘De boeken van het Leidsche St. Lucas gilde’, in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], V, Rotterdam 1882-83, pp. 172-259, esp. p. 223; Bredius in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, X, Leipzig 1914, p. 386; F.G. Meijer, ‘Pieter Cornelisz. van Egmondt, een kennismaking’, Oud Holland 104 (1990), pp. 256-69; Meijer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XXXII, Munich/Leipzig 2002, p. 380

Entry

This small panel shows a man looking out of a stone window embrasure who holds a print of Neptune and Amphitrite.³ Behind him is an easel. The composition with the arched window is a typical device of Leiden artists,⁴ but until recently there was no information on who depicted the figure.⁵

In 1990 Meijer succeeded in attributing this and other paintings to the Leiden-born Pieter van Egmondt, who had only been known shortly prior to that by the mentions in old inventories and auction catalogues.⁶ Van Egmondt’s signature was spotted on two pictures, one of which is closely related to the Rijksmuseum work.⁷ In addition, Meijer found several comparable compositions, all of them with a man posing in a window, either with musical instruments or painter’s attributes.⁸ The fact that all of them show the same figure, with his narrow chin and downy little moustache, makes it likely that he is the artist himself.⁹

None of the paintings currently attributed to Van Egmondt bear the year of execution.¹⁰ The dendrochronology of the Rijksmuseum panel indicates that it was most probably ready for use by 1642. Compared to similar pictures from his hand, it is a relatively simple scene in which the illusionistic potential of the window is barely explored at all, which suggests that it is an early venture into the genre. Some clue to the dating is provided by the oeuvre of Gerrit Dou, whose compositions seem to have inspired Van Egmondt’s. The present work is most closely related to Dou’s Man Smoking a Pipe at a Window in the Rijksmuseum,¹¹ which includes a similar stone embrasure and an easel in the background. Since this is generally assigned to shortly after the middle of the seventeenth century it argues for placing Van Egmondt’s picture around then as well.¹²

It is not clear whether Van Egmondt’s paintings of this type should be regarded as self-portraits or whether he recorded his features so often because he did not have any other model. It is equally puzzling why he is holding the framed print mounted on rollers here so pointedly and as his own attribute. The added red threads on the left and right edges indicate that is on a textile support, probably silk or satin.¹³ It is a tempting but unfortunately unprovable idea that the artist, who came from a family of silk merchants, had something to do with the manufacture or sale of prints on fabric.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

F.G. Meijer, ‘Pieter Cornelisz. van Egmondt, een kennismaking’, Oud Holland 104 (1990), pp. 256-69, esp. pp. 262, 263, 265

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 26, no. 300 (as Dutch School, Portrait of a Painter); 1976, pp. 664-65, A 1638 (as Northern Netherlandish school c. 1655, Portrait of a Painter); 1992, p. 48, no. A 1638 (as Portrait of a Painter)

Citation

Gerdien Wuestman, 2022, 'attributed to Pieter van Egmondt, Self-Portrait, c. 1655', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4802

(accessed 27 November 2024 02:23:34).