Object data
oil on panel
support: height 63.2 cm × width 131.6 cm
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne
1615
oil on panel
support: height 63.2 cm × width 131.6 cm
The support consists of three oak planks with a horizontal grain. There are slight bevels at the top and bottom; the panel was probably cut down slightly at the left and right sides. A piece of linen, which might be original, was applied on the left side of the lower join. Wooden strips approximately 1 cm wide were added at the left and right sides, probably in the 19th or 20th century. Dendrochronology could not provide a felling date. The ground layer has a whitish-buff tone, and was applied with broad brushstrokes that are visible through the paint layers. Although infrared reflectography does not reveal an underdrawing for the entire composition, it shows that the towers of the Koorkerk and of the city hall were moved to the right during the painting process, as well as some other minor changes. In addition, it shows a dark strip along the right-hand dike, possibly indicating a dark tone on top of the ground layer to prepare the darker coloured water at that spot. There appear to be some underdrawn lines along the edge of that strip. Furthermore, general underdrawn lines are visible in the trees and bushes in the left and right background. Some minor pentimenti are present, as in the legs of the white horse in the foreground. The painting is meticulously executed.
Good.
...; bequeathed to the museum by Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-98), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, 1898
Object number: SK-A-1775
Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet
Copyright: Public domain
Adriaen Pietersz van de Venne (Delft c. 1589 - The Hague 1662)
According to Cornelis de Bie, Adriaen van de Venne was born into a southern Netherlandish immigrant family in Delft in 1589. De Bie also states that he was taught drawing and illumination by the Leiden goldsmith and painter Simon de Valck, and was then apprenticed to the grisaille painter Jeronymus van Diest, both of whom are now otherwise unknown.
Van de Venne is first documented in 1614 in Middelburg, where he remained until around 1625. It was in 1614 that he married the daughter of a Zeeland sea captain, Elisabeth de Pours. Dating from that same year are his earliest known paintings, Fishing for Souls (SK-A-447) and two summer and winter pendants.1 On the evidence of an affinity with the work of Jan Brueghel the Elder, it has been assumed that he spent some time in Antwerp before 1614. However, the local Middelburg painters were already working in Brueghel’s style at that time. The fact that he married a woman of Zeeland, and that his father and his brother Jan had settled in the town in 1605 and 1608 respectively, make it likely that he was in Middelburg before 1614. In 1618, his brother Jan opened a shop selling paintings and set up a publishing business, in which Adriaen played an important role as a print designer, poet, and illustrator of books by Jacob Cats, among other authors. Starting in 1618 he also designed several propaganda prints supporting the House of Orange and Frederick V, the Elector Palatine. Van de Venne is last documented in Middelburg on 30 June 1624. He then moved to The Hague, where he is recorded as a resident on 22 March 1625. His departure from Middelburg roughly coincided with the death of his brother Jan, and his decision to settle in The Hague probably had something to do with the presence of the court there, which played an important part in the subjects he chose. Among his earliest works in The Hague were the prints and paintings of Prince Maurits Lying in State (SK-A-446), several impressions of which were ordered by the States-General on 21 July 1625.2 He enrolled in the Guild of St Luke in 1625, and a year later acquired his Hague citizenship. He retained his house in Middelburg, and in 1630 bought another one in The Hague, from which he sold his prints and books. He was warden of the guild from 1631 to 1633 and from 1637 to 1639, and filled the post of dean from 1639 to 1641. He was also a member of the Ionghe Batavieren (Young Batavians) chamber of rhetoric. His fame was such that he was included in Johannes Meyssens’s book, Image de divers hommes desprit sublime, where it is stated that the Prince of Orange owned several works by him. In 1656, Van de Venne was also involved in setting up a new confraternity, the Confrerie Pictura, which broke away from the Guild of St Luke. At the end of his life he ran into financial difficulties. He made his will in 1660 after falling ill, and died on 12 November 1662. Two of his sons, Pieter (c. 1615-57) and Huijbregt (1634/35-after 1682), were also painters.
Van de Venne’s painted oeuvre can be divided into his Middelburg and Hague periods. In Middelburg he produced some of his most ambitious, meticulously painted works with politico-allegorical subjects, as well as many landscape scenes in the manner of Jan Brueghel the Elder. In The Hague he concentrated almost exclusively on grisailles for the open market, most of them genre pieces with a comical, moralistic slant with inscribed banderoles, but he also made religious, allegorical works and a few large-scale equestrian portraits of rulers. He abandoned the meticulous style of his Middelburg period for a freer, sometimes even sketchy technique, which enabled him to boost his output to ‘hundreds of monochrome pieces, both known and desired by devotees of art’, as J. Campo Weyerman put it.
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
References
Meyssens 1649; De Bie 1661, pp. 234-46; Van Bleyswijck 1667, II, pp. 857-58; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 136-37; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 340-41; Franken 1878, pp. 7-30; Obreen II, 1879-80, pp. 108-09, III, 1880-81, pp. 258, 272, 275, IV, 1881-82, pp. 59, 128, 148, V, 1882-83, pp, 68-69, 71-74, 96, 102, 133, 153, VI, 1884-87, pp. 52, 226; Bredius II, 1916, pp. 374-93, VII, 1921, pp. 240-45; Bol 1958; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 37-74; Bol 1989; Van Suchtelen in Amsterdam 1993, p. 321; Briels 1997, pp. 394-95; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 255-62, 354
This painting shows a view of Middelburg seen from the towpath beside the canal leading to the port. In addition to several buildings, such as the long Jan van de Koorkerk and the lower, broad tower on the town hall, it is possible to identify some of the ships. The large one in the middle flying the flag of Zeeland from its foremast and a flag with the arms of Middelburg on the mainmast is probably De Zeehondt, a man-of-war belonging to the Zeeland Admiralty.3 It is on the point of leaving, for the anchor is being weighed, the sails are being unfurled, and the horses are beginning to tow it out of the port. The other vessels are moving in the opposite direction, towards the port. The yacht on the far left belongs to Prince Maurits, for it has his coat of arms on the flag on the bowsprit and the flag with oranges at the stern.4 The small private yacht in the foreground has a flag with the arms of Antwerp and the Spanish flag on the bowsprit. Franken wrongly identified the arms on the flag at the stern as those of the Van Tuyl van Serooskerke family.5 At present it remains an unidentified yacht from Antwerp. Sailing off beyond De Zeehondt is an English merchantman that was usually identified as the Red Lion, one of the English ships that brought Frederick V and Elizabeth Stuart to Vlissingen in 1613.6 Kluiver has pointed out that the Red Lion was not only larger than the ship in the painting, but did not sail into Middelburg on that occasion,7 so this ship, too, remains unidentified.
In the leading group of riders on the right bank Franken recognized Prince Maurits and his brother-in-law, Emanuel of Portugal, but these figures display too little similarity to known portraits of them.8 Kluiver has made some identifications that are better substantiated.9 He recognized the nobleman wearing a gold chain at the head of the group as Jacques de Malderée, Maurits’s representative at the States-General in Zeeland, and also his confidant.10 In addition, Van de Venne depicted himself as a horseman in the escort in the foreground, where he can be seen second from right.11
There has never been any doubt that this painting is a historical record of a visit by an important person, but the identity of that dignitary remains a mystery. Franken thought that it depicted the arrival of Elizabeth Stuart in Middelburg in 1613, when she was travelling to Heidelberg from London after her marriage to Frederick V.12 Following Franken, the subject was usually regarded as the arrival or departure of the newly-weds.13 Kluiver countered this assumption by pointing out that on the one hand Frederick and Elizabeth are nowhere to be seen, and on the other by demonstrating that archival documents show that they never set sail from the port of Middelburg.14 His persuasive argument that the painting depicts the departure of Robert Sidney, the governor of Vlissingen, from Middelburg in 161615 was overturned by the discovery of the date 1615 during conservation by Willem de Ridder in 1999.16 That discovery also put an end to the discussion about when the painting was made. Franken thought that it was dated 1625.17 That date was generally accepted until Royalton-Kisch concluded that it should be dated c. 1616 on stylistic evidence.18 After the rejection of Kluiver’s hypothesis, the visit of Frederick and Elizabeth was once again, and wrongly, put forward as the likeliest subject,19 but the historical event has still not been identified. That it is a departure and not an arrival is clear from the fact that De Zeehondt is leaving port, and that gifts are being handed out to those remaining behind.20 The theory that the painting was commissioned by Jacques de Malderée still stands.21
This painting has a more balanced look than Fishing for Souls (SK-A-447), partly because there are no allegorical elements or inscriptions, and far fewer portraits. The composition may have been inspired by Hans Bol’s gouache with a Panoramic View of Middelburg of 1598, which is a very similar but mirror-image composition.22 What this painting has in common with Fishing for Souls is the frieze-like shape of the support, the high horizon and the ships depicted without overlaps. The page on the right bank with his hand on his hip is a literal repetition of the boy on the right bank in Fishing for Souls, and shows that Van de Venne reused certain figures. The same applies to the group of horsemen in the foreground, which reappears in a slightly different form in the Landscape with Figures and a Village Kermis (SK-A-1767). The unrealistic relationships between the figures have not yet been improved. The man tending to the towing horses and the boy on the bank of the canal are too large relative to the four riders in the water. The towing horses are themselves too large compared to the elegant ones being ridden by the four horsemen. In addition, the rope towing De Zeehondt has clumsily been allowed to pass right through the group of riders. These points aside, though, the combination of a city view with a marine, portraits and genre scenes is remarkably successful. By including the towing horses Van de Venne could place peasants in the foreground, and he did so in a way that makes a wonderful contrast with the dignitaries and their elegant horses. Their presence in the foreground is repeated in The Valkenburg Horse Fair (SK-A-676).
Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 291.
Franken 1878, pp. 44-48, no. 12; Knuttel 1917, pp. 68-70, no. 23; Royalton-Kisch 1988, pp. 47-48 (as View of Middelburg); Bol 1989, pp. 50-53 (as The Harbour of Middelburg); Kluiver 1995 (as The Departure of Robert Sidney in 1616); Smulders/Van der Doe 2003, pp. 12-13, 37-68
1903, p. 277, no. 2487 (as The Arrival of Frederick V and Prince Maurits in 1613); 1934, p. 294, no. 2487 (as The Arrival of Frederick V and Prince Maurits); 1960, p. 321, no. 2487 (as The Visit of Frederick V from England to Prince Maurits on May 7, 1613); 1976, p. 565, no. A 1775 (as The Harbour of Middelburg, possibly the Departure of Elizabeth Stuart on 12 May 1613); 2007, no. 291
Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, The Departure of a Dignitary from Middelburg, 1615', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6403
(accessed 9 November 2024 17:31:59).