Cavalry Skirmish

c. 1645

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 47.3 cm × width 63.8 cm
outer size: depth 6 cm (support incl. SK-L-6840)

Inscriptions

signature, lower centre, below the log (A and V ligated): AV[…]

Technical notes

Support The single, horizontally grained oak plank is approx. 0.8 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on the left and right, and has regularly spaced saw marks, as well as horizontal plane marks in the centre.
Preparatory layers The single, beige ground extends over the edges of the support. It contains mostly white pigment with an addition of earth pigments.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends over the edges of the support. The composition was generally built up from the back to the front and from dark to light in thin layers. An initial lay-in indicated the position and arrangement of the cavalrymen in the left and right foreground. It consists of dark brown lines of the brush and brown washes suggesting light and dark areas. The sky was applied wet in wet, leaving figures and landscape mostly in reserve. Details such as the small trees on the hill on the left and the tree with its foliage on the right extend somewhat over the sky. The figures were further laid in with thin, light scumbles and brushstrokes of different shades, but leaving extensive areas of the undermodelling uncovered, in particular in the foreground, giving especially the two horsemen on the right a somewhat unfinished look. Finally, the more distinct plants in the foreground on the left were added and the grass, moss and path were indicated with regular, somewhat pastose, dabbed brushstrokes.
Anna Krekeler, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-1753/1-3, 1 November 2011
technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 1 November 2011
infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 3 November 2011

Condition

Good. There are tiny losses throughout the paint surface. The varnish has yellowed.

Provenance

…; bequeathed by Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-1898), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, to the museum, as Dutch School, with 54 other paintings, 1898;¹ on loan to Huis Van Meerten, Delft, since 1909

Object number: SK-A-1753

Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet

The artist

Abraham Verhoeve (Haarlem c. 1611/12 - Haarlem 1666)

The painter called Abraham Verhoeve or Van der Hoef who produced cavalry skirmishes and army camps around the middle of the seventeenth century did not make life easy for biographers. In the contemporary sources there are two or three artists with roughly the same forenames and surnames. Some authors associate him with the Abraham van der Hoef listed in the Delft guild register of the first half of the seventeenth century, but that was probably the Delft history painter Abraham van der Hoeven (1576-1621).

A more plausible candidate is Abraham Verhoeve of Haarlem, whose name was also given as Verhoeff, Verhoeven and Verhouve at the time, and who is sometimes called Abraham Hoef or Van der Hoeff in the literature. The son of a Flemish immigrant couple, he must have been born in 1611 or 1612, for in documents of 1633 and 1634 he said he was 22 years old or thereabouts. The only extant information about his life is that he enrolled in the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1634. He was buried in the city’s Grote Kerk on 1 July 1666, and the probate inventory of his modest estate was drawn up on 3 September. It is not known whether he was the same person as the Abraham Verhoef who joined the Leiden Guild of St Luke on 3 May 1651 and left the town at some stage.

Abraham Verhoeve mainly painted battle and camp scenes in the manner of Palamedes Palamedesz and Jan Martszen II.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

References
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.], I, Rotterdam 1877-78, p. 4; A. Bredius, ‘De boeken van het Leidsche St. Lucas gilde’, in ibid., V, 1882-83, pp. 172-259, esp. p. 214; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, I, Leipzig 1906, p. 694; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, I, The Hague 1915, pp. 364-66; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XVII, Leipzig 1924, p. 188; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lucasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1798, II, Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, pp. 421, 1033; M.E.W. Goosens, Schilders en de markt: Haarlem 1605-1635, diss., Leiden University 2001, p. 435; Wegener in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXIII, Munich/Leipzig 2012, p. 502

Entry

This violent clash between Spanish and Dutch cavalrymen, the latter identified as such by the red and orange sashes around their waists, is typical of the many that took place during the Eighty Years’ War (1568-1648). The men are fighting each other with swords, lances and pistols. Dead and wounded soldiers and horses lie on the ground. In the middle of the mêlée a fallen man is trying to drag himself along to avoid being trampled beneath the horses’ hooves. Oddly, the skirmish is set in a rocky, very un-Dutch landscape, and, as has been noted in the literature, the rider on the right is rather strange, because the introduction of firearms had long since made his lance obsolete as a cavalry weapon.²

The panel, which entered the museum in 1898 as a work of the Dutch School, was assigned in or shortly before 1909 to ‘A. Verhoeven’,³ referring to the Haarlem-born artist Abraham Verhoeve who produced many such cavalry scenes in the 1640s.⁴ The attribution appears to be borne out by the discovery in 2011 of a monogram or signature, the first two letters of which are ‘AV’ in ligature.⁵ The monogram ‘AVH’, with which Verhoeve signed his paintings, is found on a related composition with a virtually identical landscape and similar details, such as the solitary hat lying in the right foreground.⁶ The rider on the white horse levelling his sword in attack and the wounded soldiers on the ground are among the figures that also point towards Verhoeve, for they recur time and again in his oeuvre.⁷

This Cavalry Skirmish is assigned to around 1645 on the basis of the alien landscape, which formed the setting for this type of battle scene around the mid-1640s, and the fact that the fighting takes place not in the foreground but a little further off and in the background.⁸ An execution around the middle of the 1640s seems plausible on the evidence of a few scarce dated paintings by Verhoeve, among them one of 1640 in which he was beginning to experiment with a hilly background,⁹ and another of 1642 with a few compositional similarities.¹⁰

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

M.P. van Maarseveen, J.W.L. Hilkhuijsen and J. Dane (eds.), Beelden van een strijd: Oorlog en kunst vóór de Vrede van Munster 1621-1648, exh. cat. Delft (Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof) 1998, p. 312, no. 92

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 12, no. 117 (as Dutch School, second half of the 17th century); 1909, p. 418, no. 2519a; 1976, p. 279, no. A 1753

Citation

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024, 'attributed to Abraham Verhoeve, Cavalry Skirmish, c. 1645', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7490

(accessed 26 November 2024 07:44:19).