An Antique Artist

Entry

Slatkes was the first scholar to question the false Pieter de Grebber monogram and the date of 1647 on this painting, and to point out the lack of stylistic similarity to the Haarlem artist’s work.² He attributed the painting instead to Johannes van Swinderen. Indeed, the artist’s physiognomy in the Rijksmuseum portrait compares well with that of the figure of Solomon in Van Swinderen’s only documented work, The Judgement of Solomon of 1627 (fig. a). Both works also show the same highlighted, angular, rather schematic drapery style. The type of turban worn by the artist in the Rijksmuseum painting, as well as the rendering of the tight folds, are closer to the turban in another painting attributed by Slatkes to Van Swinderen, Athenaïs Banished by her Husband, the Emperor Theodosius II,³ than they are to the turban worn by Solomon in the 1627 painting. Both The Judgement of Solomon and, even more so, Athenaïs Banished by her Husband, are reminiscent of Ter Brugghen’s work, suggesting that Van Swinderen spent some time in Utrecht.⁴ The vanitas still life on the table in the Rijksmuseum work, however, indicates that part of Van Swinderen’s inspiration also came, in this case, from either Haarlem or Leiden.

Slatkes favours a date close to the 1627 Judgement of Solomon, and regards the oriental costume worn by the artist as a ‘surprising anticipation of Rembrandt’s self-portraits in exotic dress’.⁵ This, however, seems too much praise for a part-time, provincial artist. One is, therefore, prompted to think that Van Swinderen followed a prototype that is no longer traceable, or that the painting was executed after 1631, the date of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait in Oriental Attire,⁶ and the version of it by Rembrandt’s Leiden pupil, Isaac de Jouderville.⁷

The three-quarter profile pose of the figure of Solomon in the 1627 painting suggests that he and his look-alike in the Rijksmuseum painting are not portraits of Van Swinderen himself. The rather haughty demeanour of the extravagantly dressed ‘antique’ artist, and the skull, indicate that the painting carries a weighty message. The witty placement of the skull above the drawn torso of a man suggests the triumph of death over art, but crowning the skull is the painter’s palette and brushes. Art, therefore, comes out on top: ars longa, vita brevis.

Jonathan Bikker, 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. 277.