Family Group with a Black Man

Entry

Technical examination in 2005 revealed that more than half of this work is overpainted.³ An X-radiograph shows that four of the eight figures – the standing boy holding the pole, the girl standing on the far right, and the two youngest children – are later additions, and that the man with the black cloak was painted on top of another figure (fig. a). The original background, floor and tablecloth are also concealed by a later paint layer. Only the two seated women and the black man are original. The added figures and the overpaintings are by another, considerably less talented artist.

The painting, which was bought as a work by Thomas de Keyser in 1866, has been hanging in the museum’s reserves for more than a century. Given the standard of the overpainting, it is not surprising that no attention was paid to suggestions that the artist should be sought in the near vicinity of Willem Duyster⁴ or Pieter Codde.⁵ The moment it became clear which parts of the composition were original and which were not, the question of the attribution proved less problematic than was feared. The painting displays all the stylistic features found in the work of Willem Duyster, and is closely related to his signed portrait of a couple in Dublin (fig. b).

The distinctive elements are the bare, empty room, the elongated, slender figures, the hard contour lines and the striking white highlights in the faces (cf. SK-C-514). The broadbrimmed hat that the man with the cloak wears in the X-rays, and a few notable details in the rendering of textures, such as the turned-up skirt of the seated woman on the left, and the curling ends of the lace cuffs, are typical of the artist. As a result of the abrasion in the garb of the seated women, there is now very little pleasure to be had from Duyster’s talent for imitating textures.

The painting can be dated to the early 1630s on the evidence of the clothing of the two seated women, Duyster’s stylistic development, insofar as it is known, and the dendrochronological findings. The X-radiographs show that the additions and modifications were made in at least two phases.⁶ In the first, the man was overpainted and the children added, and some time later their clothing was brought up to date. On the evidence of the clothing and the original collars of the added figures, Marieke de Winkel believes that the first intervention took place around 1645, and the second around 1650. Among the changes made in that second phase were the reduction in the size of the collars of the standing man and the boy, and the replacement of the neckerchief with hanging corners of the girl standing on the right with a collar with a horizontal lower border.⁷ This means that changes were made some 18 years after the portrait was painted. The person who commissioned them had no choice but to employ another artist, because Duyster had died in 1635.

One can only guess at the nature of the family’s circumstances that led to the overpainting. One possibility is that the seated woman on the right had the portrait of her second husband painted over that of her first, deceased one. However, since her clothing was not modernized, it is more likely that she herself had died and that her husband had brought the portrait of his family up to date. The X-radiograph, though, does not answer the question whether the rather stocky man with his pronounced nose is an older version of the man underneath.

Another unanswered question is which family this is. The 19th-century identification of Admiral Pieter Pietersz Heijn (1577-1629) and his family can be readily dismissed, for the naval hero died childless.⁸ Little credence can be given to the theory that his face was painted over that of another man in order to push up the price of the painting.⁹ In 1934 the man with the black cloak was identified as the Zeeland vice-admiral Joos Banckert, also known as Van Trappen (c. 1598-1647). That identification was based on a resemblance between the standing man and a portrait of Banckert in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-202). However, the composition of Banckert’s family does not match that shown in this painting.¹⁰ Nor are there any medals or other attributes that would identify the man as Banckert or some other naval hero.

The black man behind the table has always been regarded as a servant, which would make the painting an early example of the later fashion in portraiture in which the patrons were accompanied by a black slave.¹¹ There certainly were black servants working in Amsterdam in this period, particularly for Portuguese Jews,¹² but it is not certain that the man in Duyster’s family portrait was indeed a slave. In view of the self-assured position he occupies in the scene, and his costly ruff and attire, it is possible that he was a business acquaintance who was staying in the Republic to learn Dutch.¹³

It is possible that the central figure with his black hat and clothes was a shipowner or merchant trading on behalf of the West India Company.¹⁴ Duyster’s brother Dirck was deputy commissioner for the West India Company at Fort Orange on the Hudson river north of Nieuw Amsterdam, modern-day New York. It is known for certain that Duyster the artist had trading contacts in Fort Orange, for in an archival document discovered by Bredius he authorized Simon Kick to collect the sum of 170 guilders from a barber called Harmen Meijndersz.¹⁵

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

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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. 65.