Portrait of Sir Pieter Courten (1581-1630)

Entry

Sir Pieter Courten was the son of Guillaume Courten and Margarita Cassier.⁵ He married a widow, Hortensia del Prado, in Cologne, and settled with her in Middelburg, where they lived in ‘Het Grote Huis’ in Lange Noordstraat, which Courten had commissioned.⁶ A few houses away lived the poet Jacob Cats, who was a member of their circle. Hortensia del Prado was the model for the virtuous wife whose praises Cats sang in his Houwelyck (Marriage).⁷ No children were born to the couple. After Hortensia’s death in 1627, Pieter Courten married Elisabeth Honing on 17 March 1629. According to his nephew Pieter Boudaen Courten,⁸ Pieter Courten fell ill in October of the same year, and died, ‘wasted away’, on 12 January 1630.⁹

This portrait of Pieter Courten (shown here) comes from the De Witte van Citters Bequest and entered the museum in 1903. Oddly enough, it has never been associated with that of his wife Hortensia del Prado (SK-A-910), which arrived in the museum from the same family collection nearly 20 years earlier.¹⁰ The paintings have the same dimensions, very similar frames, and the same compositional setting of an oval, stone framework. Given the dates of death of the two individuals and the differences in the frames, it can be assumed that the two paintings were not made at the same time. Courten’s portrait, with the inscription ‘1630’, must be posthumous, painted either in 1630, the year of his death, or even later. The undated portrait of his wife, who died three years before him, must date from the 1620s, for Hortensia del Prado is wearing the fashion of that period.¹¹

It is possible that the portraits in the Rijksmuseum served as companion pieces. An 18th-century list of paintings in Kasteel Popkensburg mentions the portraits of Pieter Courten and Hortensia del Prado one after the other.¹² According to that list, both works had an inscription by Johan Boudaen Courten.¹³ The strip of vellum with this text is still on the back of Hortensia’s portrait, but it is missing from Pieter Courten’s. It could have been removed, or possibly there was another version of the same portrait, although none is known.

The likeliest people to have commissioned the portraits of Pieter Courten and Hortensia del Prado in Popkensburg are Pieter Boudaen Courten and his wife Catharina Fourmenois. Boudaen Courten was Pieter Courten’s nephew and heir, and Fourmenois was Del Prado’s daughter. The labels written by their son Johan show that both works were in the Boudaen Courten family at an early date.

The portraits of Courten and Del Prado have both been associated with the Middelburg painter Salomon Mesdach. The one of Hortensia del Prado, in particular, displays similarities to the paintings attributed to Mesdach in the Rijksmuseum as regards style and the structure of the paint layers.¹⁴ Courten’s portrait is built up in a similar way, with light grey dead-colouring beneath the face and the ruff, but it is hard to say whether the painting is by the same hand, since the face has been heavily overpainted. Ekkart assumes that it is a later copy, partly on the evidence of the weak execution of the ruff, the folds of which were not properly understood.¹⁵ However, the condition of the painting and the lack of an original preclude a definitive pronouncement.

There is a second version of Hortensia’s portrait, possibly a replica.¹⁶ A modern copy of her portrait by Aat Veldhoen (1934-) was auctioned in 1998.¹⁷ The Rijksmuseum has two other portraits of Hortensia del Prado, by Gortzius Geldorp (SK-A-2072 and SK-A-2081) as well as a copper shield of 1625 with the arms of the Del Prado and Courten families (SK-A-928).

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. 180.