Still Life with Westerwald Jug and Smoking Paraphernalia

Jan Jansz Treck (Amsterdam c. 1606 - Amsterdam 1652)

A notarized document of 1633 states that Jan Jansz Treck was ‘about 27 years old’ at the time, so he was probably born around 1606. His family was reasonably well-off, for when his mother Grietje Jansdr drew up her will in 1623 she left him 3,000 guilders in cash together with all the works of art that she had bought or would buy for him, as well as all the paintings he had made or would still make that she had purchased from him. Two years earlier his sister Geertruijd had married the Amsterdam still-life artist Jan Jansz den Uyl, with whom Treck very probably trained. They went on to work together and there is at least one still life that is signed by both of them.³ The 1630s was a prosperous decade for Treck and his brother-in-law. They collaborated not only as painters but also in property deals. In 1639 Treck sold a house and yard ‘by the Heiligeweg Gate, behind the Guardhouse’ for Den Uyl. After the latter’s death in 1640, Treck promised to pay all his debts and became his sons’ guardian. That same year he lent the art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh an unspecified sum of money. Documents show that Treck was living with his sister on Bloemgracht, ‘at the sign of the Owl’. In 1643-44 he lodged with the unknown artist Abraham Jansz, ‘residing by the Heiligeweg Gate’. Ten years later the latter’s widow Engeltje Teunis was still trying to get Treck’s heirs to pay his arrears of board and lodging, minus the costs ‘of a window that she has had installed above the seat where he painted’. She also claimed that after her husband’s death in 1650 Treck had made off with his easel, grinding stone, panels, brushes and pigments. Strangely enough, he seems to have been fairly wealthy at this stage of his life. In 1643 he lent the timber merchant Jan Cornelisz de Boer 1,800 guilders at 5 per cent interest, and that same year he sold a house ‘in Halsteeg, opposite Dwarsstraat’ for 6,000 guilders.

Treck made a will in 1647 in which he left his possessions to his sister Geertruijd and her children Jan and Johannes Jansz den Uyl, his brother’s son Jan Hendricksz Treck and ‘his good friend’ Abraham Jansz. He died five years later, and his probate inventory was drawn up on 27 September 1652. He left more than 10,000 guilders, mainly in the form of bonds and debentures. Most of it went to his three nephews. Jan and Johannes den Uyl were by then living in Amersfoort, where the former had followed in the footsteps of his father and his uncle by becoming a painter.

Like his brother-in-law, who was ten years his senior, Treck focused almost exclusively on ‘banquets’ and ‘tobaccos’. For the first genre he used a fairly limited repertoire of objects which he depicted in different arrangements: drinking vessels such as a rummer and a pass glass, a couple of Chinese bowls, a pewter jug, a salt cellar and a white tablecloth. His earliest signed work dates from 1635.⁴ It seems that his paintings were not very expensive. Two of his still lifes with silver dishes were valued at 15 and 20 guilders in 1648. The simple compositions of his scenes with smokers’ requisites, in particular, are closely allied to those by Jan Jansz van de Velde III, but it is not known whether one of them influenced the other. A document of 1661 states that Simon Luttichuys ‘retouched and finished’ at least one ‘Vanitas’ by Treck, but it seems unlikely that these two artists were in touch. The same goes for Pieter van Anraadt, whose only extant still life is closely related to Treck’s work.⁵

Erlend de Groot, 2024

References
A. Bredius and N. de Roever, ‘Rembrandt, nieuwe bijdragen tot zijne levensgeschiedenis, II: Bijlage B: Jan Jansz. Uyl of Den Uyl: geboren omstreeks 1595, overleden 1640 te Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 5 (1887), pp. 229-34, esp. p. 232; A. Bredius, ‘Jan Jansz. Uyl (een nalezing)’, Oud Holland 35 (1917), pp. 193-95, esp. p. 194; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, IV, The Hague, 1917, pp. 1289, 1292; ibid., V, 1918, p. 1688; ibid., VI, 1919, pp. 2085-96; ibid., VII, 1921, p. 235; A.P.A. Vorenkamp, Bijdrage tot de geschiedenis van het Hollandsch stilleven in de zeventiende eeuw, diss., Leiden University 1933, pp. 41-44; Trautscholdt in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXIII, Leipzig 1939, pp. 367-68; P. de Boer, ‘Jan Jansz. Den Uyl’, Oud Holland 57 (1940), pp. 49-64; A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, pp. 196-97; J. van der Veen, ‘Het kunstbedrijf van Hendrick Uylenburgh in Amsterdam: Productie en handel tussen 1625 en 1655’, in F. Lammertse and J. van der Veen, Uylenburgh en Zoon: Kunst en commercie van Rembrandt tot De Lairesse, 1625-1675, exh. cat. London (Dulwich Picture Gallery)/Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2006, pp. 117-205, esp. pp. 188-89