Portrait of Princes Maurits (1567-1625) and Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647)

c. 1615 - c. 1625

Object data

oil on paper

support: height 12 cm × width 10.5 cm
outer size: height 16.5 cm × width 13.5 cm × depth 2.7 cm (support incl. frame)

Technical notes

The yellow-brownish tinted paper support is a fragment of a larger sheet with a drawing in red chalk, the fragmentary subject of which remains unclear. There is no watermark. On the back of the paper are some pen-marks, possibly ink trials. The painted portraits are prepared on top of the red chalk drawing in white chalk, defining the oval shape of the format as well as the figures. A preparation in dark paint is visible in the clothing of the left-hand figure. Infrared reflectography revealed no underdrawing, due to the dark pigments. Examination with the stereomicroscope suggested that the portraits must have been painted with an oil-based medium. No ground layer or varnish was applied. While the faces, hats and collars are meticulously worked out, the costumes were executed in a sketchier manner.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 22 July 2002
infrared reflectography: E. Buijsen, RKD, 23 July 2002

Condition

Good.

Provenance

...; collection, F.C.T. Baron van Isendoorn à Blois van de Cannenborch, Vaassen;¹ his sale, Amsterdam (De Brakke Grond), 19 August 1879, no. 41, as Anthony van Dijck (‘Deux portraits de gentilhommes sur une feulille. A l’huile’), fl. 23, to Dr Abraham Bredius (1855-1946), The Hague;² by whom given to Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-98), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, 1888;³ by whom bequeathed to the museum, 1898

Object number: SK-A-1776

Credit line: D. Franken Bequest, Le Vésinet

The artist

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.⁴ 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 1625.⁵ 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

Entry

Van de Venne used a fragment of a drawing in red chalk as the support for these painted portrait studies of Maurits and Frederik Hendrik. They were prepared with white chalk and are set within an oval contour line, which suggests that they were intended for an oval miniature. However, Van de Venne only worked up the faces, hats and collars, leaving the rest of the picture surface empty apart from a rough delineation of the costumes. The fragmentary nature of the red chalk drawing makes it impossible to say whether it, too, is from his hand.

The very meticulous execution ties in closely with Van de Venne’s early Middelburg work. The facial features of the subjects are very similar to those in the portraits of Maurits and Frederik Hendrik engraved by Willem Jacobsz Delff after Van de Venne in 1618,⁶ as well as to the portraits in Van de Venne’s Cavalcade of Princes and Counts of Nassau, which Knuttel dated around 1615.⁷ The tall hats argue for a dating prior to 1625, when they were replaced in Van de Venne’s oeuvre by lower hats with broad brims. The portraits can therefore be dated between 1615 and 1625.

Since the work is unfinished, it may have served in Van de Venne’s workshop as a model for portraits of Frederik Hendrik and Maurits in such paintings, as The Valkenburg Horse Fair (SK-A-676).

Gerdien Wuestman, 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. 293.

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 278, no. 2490; 1934, p. 295, no. 2490; 1976, p. 567, no. A 1776; 2007, no. 293

Citation

Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'Adriaen Pietersz. van de Venne, Portrait of Princes Maurits (1567-1625) and Frederik Hendrik (1584-1647), c. 1615 - c. 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7492

(accessed 14 November 2024 23:57:34).