Portrait of Jan Gaspar Gevaerts (1593-1666)

c. 1630 - c. 1650

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 25.7 cm × width 20.2 cm
outer size: depth 4.3 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

inscription, indistinct, on the reverse: [Casperus Gevaerts]

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 11 October 2006
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 7 September 2007

Provenance

…; sale, Warnar Wreesman Borghartzoon (c. 1748-1814, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 11 April 1816, no. 55 (‘Een Wederga van den voorgaanden [the portrait of Rubens, SK-A-2318], steld voor den Advokaat C: Gevartius, in alles als de voorgaande, door denzelven [op. P. h.10, br. 7.1/2 duimen [26.5 x 19.6 cm] door A. van Dyk]’), with SK-A-2318 (no. 54), fl. 275, to the dealer Jeronimo de Vries for Lucretia Johanna van Winter (1785-1845), Amsterdam;¹ her husband Jonkheer Hendrik Six van Hillegom (1790-1847), Amsterdam; their sons Jonkheer Jan Pieter Six van Hillegom (1824-1899) and Jonkheer Pieter Hendrik Six van Vromade (1827-1905); from the latter’s heirs, with 37 other pictures, fl. 751,000, with a contribution from the Rembrandt Society of fl. 200,000, to the Dutch Government, 1907; presented to the museum, with SK-A-2318, 1908; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, 1999-2011

Object number: SK-A-2319

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Anthony van Dyck (Antwerp 1599 - London 1641)

Anthony van Dyck was baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, Antwerp, on 22 March 1599, the seventh child of a prosperous haberdasher. He died on 9 December 1641 in Blackfriars, London, and was buried two days later in Saint Paul’s Cathedral. By then he was internationally famous, and had to his credit an oeuvre of well over seven hundred paintings, consisting mostly in portraits, but also some highly esteemed sacred and profane figure subjects. He had outlived Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who had greatly influenced him in his youth, by only some eighteen months, but he was to prove the more widely influential.

Enrolled as a pupil of Hendrik van Balen (1574/1575-1632) in 1609, he became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke nine years later before he was eighteen and a week before he received his majority – an event perhaps connected with this father’s financial difficulties which had begun in 1615 and ended with the sale of the family house in 1620, having caused strife in the family. In the meantime, Van Dyck had earlier entered Rubens’s studio, and had perhaps already operated unofficially as an artist working from a house in Antwerp called Den Dom van Ceulen. He was the only one of Rubens’s assistants to be named in the contract for the paintings for the Antwerp Jesuit Church signed on 22 March 1620.

There is no contemporary archival evidence for the existence of a studio functioning for Van Dyck before he left Antwerp for London and Rome. However, statements given in a lawsuit in Antwerp in 1660/1661 and the number of contemporary versions of some of Van Dyck’s works of that time would indicate at the least that there was a group of artists working in Van Dyck’s milieu, however informally.²

Van Dyck left Antwerp for London in October 1620; the purpose of his short visit – he was granted permission to leave at the end of the following February – is not known, but he received a payment from King James I (1566-1625) and was expected to return in eight months. He was recorded soon afterwards as living in Rome in the same house as George Gage (c. 1582-1632), an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ employed by the British crown to advance negotiations for the prince of Wales’s ‘Spanish match’ at the papal court.³

In Italy, Van Dyck was active in Rome, Venice, Genoa and Palermo.⁴ He re-established himself in 1627 in Antwerp, and was appointed court painter to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Archduchess Isabella (1566-1633); his practice extended to The Hague whence he was summoned on two occasions.

By the summer of 1632, Van Dyck had settled in London; he was knighted by King Charles I (1600-1649) and then granted an annual pension as a retainer. But in the spring of 1634, he was in Antwerp and by the end of the year he was living in Brussels. By March 1635 he had returned to London and was established in a studio, specially converted by the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652), on the Thames at Blackfriars. In great demand, not only by the king as a portrait painter, Van Dyck mixed with members of the court and married in 1640 Mary Ruthven, who was of a Scots noble family. In the autumn of 1640 he was in Antwerp, and early in 1641 briefly in Paris whence he returned hoping to gain the patronage of King Louis XIII (1601-1643) and Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642). There in November, he wrote that he was very unwell; back in London with his wife for her lying-in, he died shortly after the birth of his daughter, Justiniana.

References
S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, pp. 1-12

Entry

Jan Gaspar Gevaerts (Gevartius; 1593-1666), the sitter in this portrait, was an internationally famous, classical scholar, as well as a lawyer, historian and diplomat. He was town clerk to the city of Antwerp from 1621 to 1662, and a trusted friend of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640). One of Gevaerts’s duties was to collaborate with him in devising the programme for the decorations for the Joyous Entry of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand (1609/1610-1641) into Antwerp in 1635, about which he wrote a detailed, learned commentary in Latin: Pompa triumphalis introitus Ferdinandi Austriaci hispaniarum infantis, &c. in urbem Antverpiam, 1642.

This sketch in brunaille, which has the same provenance as SK-A-2318, has been thought to be a copy of the sketch owned by the duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry at Boughton House, Northamptonshire,⁵ which is one of the group of grisaille oil sketches long associated with the creation of the Iconography, a collection of prints of portraits of notable personages (see SK-A-2318) designed by Anthony van Dyck and mainly engraved by Paul Pontius (1603-1658). This is likely but not certain, as the museum picture shows one button fewer on the tunic. In fact, among other differences the Boughton sketch in its turn shows one button fewer than appear in Pontius’s engraving.⁶ Like SK-A-2318, the present picture is described as a work executed in Van Dyck’s studio in the 1976 museum catalogue. However, it is hard to believe that the studio could have produced such a poorly executed painting. Actually, although they are equally as weak, the handling in the two works differs. Neither need necessarily have been painted in Van Dyck’s lifetime.

Van Dyck’s engraved portrait of Gevaerts is quite different from Rubens’s more static image of his friend in the Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Antwerp;⁷ the latter may have been painted a little later, as the hair is shown slightly receded.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

Vey in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, under no. III.154

Collection catalogues

1908, p. 417, no. 857b (as by Van Dyck); 1934, p. 91, no. 857b; 1976, p. 209, no. A 2319 (as studio of Van Dyck)

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'after Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of Jan Gaspar Gevaerts (1593-1666), c. 1630 - c. 1650', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8291

(accessed 10 November 2024 16:53:58).