Portrait of Catharina Fourmenois (1598-1665)

Entry

Pieter Boudaen Courten (SK-A-2068) and Catharina Fourmenois (shown here) were married the year before these pendant portraits were executed. They are both shown three-quarter length, standing beside a chair. Great care has been taken over the depiction of the accessories and jewellery, lace collars and cuffs, and the materials of their extremely costly attire.⁵ The family coats of arms on the backs of both panels were probably added in the 18th century.⁶

Pieter Boudaen Courten, scion of a rich family of silk and linen merchants, was a director of the Middelburg chamber of the Dutch East India Company and a councillor of Middelburg. He was born in Rotterdam in 1594 as the son of Matthias Boudaen and Margarita Courten (SK-A-2073). His sister was Anna Boudaen Courten (SK-A-919). After his father’s death he lived for a while with his mother and stepfather in London before moving to Middelburg to help his uncle Pieter Courten (SK-A-2074) run the Zeeland branch of the family business. On 15 July 1618, in Middelburg, he married Catharina Fourmenois, his uncle’s stepdaughter. A lot is known about the personal life of Pieter Boudaen Courten and his family from the chronicle he kept.⁷

At the end of the 19th century, when these two pendants and the portrait of Margarita Courten were in the Des Tombe collection in The Hague,⁸ Bredius attributed them to the relatively unknown Middelburg painter Salomon Mesdach⁹ Bredius’s attribution was based on stylistic similarities to the portrait of Balthasar van Vlierden and his family, signed and dated 1612, which was also in a Hague collection at the time (fig. a). That coarsely painted, rather archaic piece, the only known work with Mesdach’s signature, may be one of his early works.

Bredius’s attribution is borne out by another, smaller group portrait, going by the patron’s annotation ‘By Mr. Salomon tot Middelburg’, which appears to have been painted after a lost original, probably by the same artist. That portrait, showing Dr Pieter Gerritsz Schaep and Margriete Pauli Halling with their son, can be dated in or after 1624 (fig. b).¹⁰ One characteristic of that small group portrait and the works described here is the detailed rendering of the clothing, which in the cases of Margriete Pauli Halling and Catharina Fourmenois even extended to the lacing of their decorated stomachers.

In the past century, more and more portraits of members of the Courten family have been attributed to Mesdach. The ones most closely related to these two companion pieces are the portraits of Jacob Pergens, Anna Boudaen Courten and Margarita Courten, but that of Peter Courten (SK-A-913), and those of a man, probably Walterus Fourmenois, and of Hortensia del Prado also display similarities in style and the structure of the paint layers. However risky it may be to ascribe paintings to an artist whose oeuvre consists almost entirely of attributions, there is every reason to believe that all these portraits were painted by Mesdach. Just as members of families related to him by marriage commissioned portraits from Gortzius Geldorp for decades, it seems that Pieter Boudaen Courten and his family always turned to the same artist.

Copies of the present pendants, in which the sitters are reduced to half-lengths, are still in the family.¹¹ The Rijksmuseum also has a portrait of Catharina Fourmenois at the age of six by Gortzius Geldorp (SK-A-2070), and a copper shield of 1623 with the coats of arms of the Boudaen and Fourmenois families.¹²

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. 175.