Object data
oil on panel
support: height 34.6 cm × width 32.3 cm × thickness 1.5 cm
outersize: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. SK-L-4503)
Jacob van Spreeuwen
A Scholar in his Study
1645
Inscriptions
- signature and date, lower left, below the door: J.cv.spreuwe[.]1645
Technical notes
Support The single, horizontally grained, quarter-sawn, vertical oak plank is approx. 1.1 cm thick. The bottom and top edges may have been trimmed. The reverse is bevelled on all sides, though less so at the top and bottom. Only the bottom edge has a clear saw mark. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1627. The panel could have been ready for use by 1638, but a date in or after 1644 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The thin, smooth double ground extends up to the edges of the support at the top and bottom, and over the left and right edges. The first, white layer consists of what seems to be chalk. The second ground is a warm off-white containing fine white pigment particles, and black and earth pigments.
Underdrawing Infrared photography revealed a few very fine, short contour lines, as well as lines defining the forms of the figure’s cuff and the floor.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support at the top and bottom, and over the left and right edges. Still visible in many places, the initial lay-in of the background and foreground was done in transparent browns with some opaque earth-coloured scumbles containing coarse white pigment particles. The composition was built up using reserves, with carefully closed edges for the figure and the book, for instance, while those for the objects in the foreground were partially left open. The legs of the chair, though, were executed over the floor’s horizontal lines. The flesh areas were underpainted with a light grey, consisting of coarse white and black pigment particles. The imaginary letters on the page of the book and the documents were meticulously applied with a fine brush in varying shades of grey and black on top of the dry underpaint. Both feet were first planned somewhat more to the left, as can be seen with the naked eye. The paint layers are very smooth.
Gwen Tauber, Michel van de Laar, 2023
Scientific examination and reports
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 8 April 2011
- infrared photography: G. Tauber, RMA, 16 June 2011
- paint samples: G. Tauber, RMA, nos. SK-A-1713/1-2, 16 June 2011
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 16 June 2011
- paint samples: M. van de Laar, RMA, nos. SK-A-1713/1-2, 8 September 2011
- technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 8 September 2011
- infrared photography: M. van de Laar, RMA, 17 February 2014
Condition
Fair. There are three small, horizontal cracks in the wood close to the bottom edge and a larger one at upper right, running approx. 20 cm into the picture plane. The wood grain has become visible due to increased transparency of the ground and minor abrasion of the paint. There are discoloured retouchings, old retouched scratches and losses along the edges. One long scratch is evident below the table. The varnish, applied when the painting was framed, has severely yellowed and crazed. The current frame covers 2.2 cm of the left edge of the picture plane.
Provenance
…; ? sale, Middelburg (Mattijssen), 20 April 1779, no. 124, with pendant, no. 125 (‘Spreeuwe, 1645. Twee stuks verbeeldende een Philosoph in een Binnenhuis, zittende aan een Tafel waarop een Globe en een Boek daar tegen aan en meer Bywerk; en het andere zynde een Binnenhuis, daar in een Vrouwtje met een Spinnewiel en Boek op haar Schoot en meer Bywerk, op P. yder 14 dm. breet 13 dm [36 x 33.4 cm].’);…; sale, Gijsbert de Clercq (1850-1911, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (F. Muller), 1 June 1897, no. 93, fl. 300, to the museum, with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt; on loan to the Gallery Prince Willem V, The Hague, 1977-81
Object number: SK-A-1713
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Jacob van Spreeuwen (Leiden c. 1609/10 - ? after 1650)
Although the baptismal records for Leiden from before 1621 have not been preserved, it is fairly certain that Jacob van Spreeuwen was born there in 1609 or 1610, as his registration at the university in April 1624 gives his age as 14 and Leiden as his home town. He was the third child of the baker Cornelis Jorisz van Spreeuwen and Annetgen Jans, who married in that city in 1605. In 1639 Cornelia van Couwenhoven became Jacob van Spreeuwen’s wife; she would die seven years later. His name is not to be found in the registers of the Leiden Guild of St Luke, which were first kept in 1648. He may already have moved by then, as he wedded Anna Splinter, a still-life painter and widow of the Amsterdam artist Pieter Quast, in Scheveningen in 1650. Van Spreeuwen’s whereabouts since, including the place and date of his death, are not known.
Van Spreeuwen’s training has not been documented, but the subject matter and style of his paintings are indebted to Rembrandt, Gerrit Dou and Quiringh van Brekelenkam. His earliest signed and dated picture, Bathsheba, is from 1633, and his latest one, St Jerome in the Wilderness, from 1647.1 In addition to histories Van Spreeuwen’s oeuvre includes a number of genre scenes.
Jonathan Bikker, 2023
References
Gerson in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXI, Leipzig 1937, p. 407; E.J. Sluijter, M. Enklaar and P. Nieuwenhuizen (eds.), Leidse fijnschilders: Van Gerrit Dou tot Frans van Mieris de Jonge, 1630-1760, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) 1988, p. 222; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, IV, Landau/Pfalz 1989, pp. 2548-50; Veldman in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, CV, Munich/Leipzig 2019, p. 338
Entry
The theme of the secular scholar in his study was developed in Leiden in the 1630s by Rembrandt, Jan Lievens, Gerrit Dou and their circle.2 There are no fewer than six pictures of this subject by or attributed to Jacob van Spreeuwen, some of which include elaborate still lifes derived from Dou’s example.3 Van Spreeuwen, however, never achieved the latter’s level of detail, his thinly painted, sketchy compositions being more akin to those of another Leiden artist, Quiringh van Brekelenkam.
As Bauch was the first to point out, the pose of Van Spreeuwen’s scholar is based on Rembrandt’s 1629 An Old Man Asleep.4 Both their figures have one hand tucked into their mantle or shirt and rest their weary heads on the other. Indicative of Van Spreeuwen’s limited talent is the clumsy way in which he arranged the man’s legs so that the position of his left one is unclear and the right one appears to dangle in the air. The inclusion of books and a globe also changes the iconography of Rembrandt’s elder, which was likely meant as a personification of sloth, one of the seven deadly sins. Based on the Old Testament proverb, ‘A slothful man hideth his hand in his bosom, and will not so much as bring it to his mouth again’ (Proverbs 19:24), the gesture of the hand placed within a cloak became connected with idleness since around 1200.5 The same association goes for the way Rembrandt’s figure, his eyes shut, supports his head with his other hand. Van Spreeuwen’s greybeard may be depicted as lazy, therefore, but this pose was also used to symbolize melancholy, an affliction suffered by many a scholar in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings and prints. However, the fact that Van Spreeuwen’s old man is staring ahead, so not sleeping, favours an interpretation of him as a Melancholic rather than slothful.6
The subject of the scholar in his study originated with medieval depictions of St Jerome in his cell.7 He is shown in the same melancholic pose as Van Spreeuwen’s figure in a number of sixteenth and seventeenth-century paintings and prints.8 Like St Jerome in those works, Van Spreeuwen’s greybeard may be contemplating the transience of earthly existence, which is symbolized here by the globe on the table. Its presence and the scholar’s dejected air, however, would also have reminded the contemporary viewer of the classical philosopher Heraclitus, who wept at the follies of the world. Usually accompanied by his laughing colleague Democritus, Heraclitus was almost invariably depicted with a globe in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings, and in several of them Heraclitus rests his weary head in his hand in order to express his melancholic state.9
Van Spreeuwen’s Scholar in his Study is probably identical with the ‘Philosopher in an interior, sitting at a table upon which is a globe and a book resting against it’ at an auction in Middelburg in 1779.10 In addition to that description, the date, measurements and support recorded in the catalogue for that sale match the Rijksmuseum panel. It also listed a pendant in the form of ‘a woman with a spinning wheel and a book on her lap’.11 Unfortunately, no such picture can be found in Van Spreeuwen’s extant oeuvre, but the likelihood that it was a true companion piece to the ‘Philosopher’ seems distinct, given the fact that Van Spreeuwen combined a scholar and a woman spinning in another painting.12
Jonathan Bikker, 2023
See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
Literature
K. Bauch, Der frühe Rembrandt und seine Zeit: Studien zur geschichtlichen Bedeutung seines Frühstils, Berlin 1960, p. 267, note 194; S. Koslow, ‘Frans Hals’s Fisherboys: Exemplars of Idleness’, The Art Bulletin 57 (1975), pp. 418-32, esp. p. 426; E.J. Sluijter, M. Enklaar and P. Nieuwenhuizen (eds.), Leidse fijnschilders: Van Gerrit Dou tot Frans van Mieris de Jonge, 1630-1760, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) 1988, pp. 222-23, no. 75; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, IV, Landau/Pfalz 1989, pp. 2548, 2563, no. 1710, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 250, no. 2225; 1934, p. 267, no. 2225; 1976, p. 520, no. A 1713
Citation
Jonathan Bikker, 2023, 'Jacob van Spreeuwen, A Scholar in his Study, 1645', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5484
(accessed 26 November 2024 08:26:10).