Witches’ Sabbath

1636

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 56.8 cm × width 97.9 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, centre left, on the pedestal of the obelisk: C. Heck / fecit / 1636

Technical notes

The support consists of three horizontally grained oak planks and is bevelled on all edges except the top. That edge, however, was primed, which indicates that the painting has not been cut down. The white ground layer was deliberately allowed to show through the thinly applied paint layers. An underdrawing is visible with the naked eye. There is no appreciable impasto nor visible brushmarking, and the figures were not reserved.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 22 May 2006

Condition

Fair. There are three old but stable cracks in the panel, and numerous pinpoint losses in the ground and paint layers. The paint layers are moderately abraded and have become more transparent. The lower left corner has been overpainted. The varnish is somewhat discoloured.

Original framing

An ebony flat frame¹

Provenance

...; sale, Evert Moll Sr (Rijswijk) et al. [section Evert Moll Sr], Amsterdam (F. Muller), 15 December 1908 sqq., no. 49, to Ernst Heldring (1871-1954), Amsterdam; by whom donated to the museum, 1909; on loan to the Mauritshuis, Galerij Prins Willem V, The Hague, 1978-94; on loan to the Stedelijk Museum, Alkmaar, since 2000

Object number: SK-A-2373

Credit line: Gift of E. Heldring, Amsterdam

The artist

Claes Jacobsz van der Heck (Alkmaar c. 1575/81 - Alkmaar 1652)

Claes Jacobsz van der Heck was the most important painter in Alkmaar in the first decades of the 17th century, and one of the founders of the town’s Guild of St Luke in 1631. Based on his age, which is recorded variously in a number of archival documents, he was probably born in Alkmaar between 1575 and 1581. As Karel van Mander discusses him in his Schilder-boeck of 1604, the actual year of Van der Heck’s birth is probably closer to 1575 than to 1581. Van Mander also mentions Van der Heck’s father, Jacob Dircksz van der Heck, who was a nephew of Maarten van Heemskerck and owned portraits by that famous 16th-century painter. By profession Jacob Dircksz van der Heck was secretary and steward of the drainage locks water board. Claes Jacobsz van der Heck married Cecilia Arts van Wede sometime before 1606, the year in which the couple’s eldest child was born.

According to Van Mander, Van der Heck trained with the little-known Haarlem landscape painter Jan Nagel. Van der Heck painted mountainous landscapes in the tradition of Joos de Momper, often with biblical or mythological staffage, as well as topographical views. His earliest dated painting, however, is not a landscape but the 1611 Portrait of Magrita Heyckens.² His most important work as a portraitist is Officers of the Old Civic Guard in a Landscape, executed in 1613.³ Van der Heck was also active as a history painter. In 1616, 1618 and 1620 he painted three judicial scenes drawn from the Bible, Dutch and classical history for the magistrates’ chamber of Alkmaar Town Hall: The Judgement of Solomon, The Judgement of Count William the Good and The Judgement of Cambyses.⁴

Claes van der Heck probably trained his eldest son Maarten, who was named after his famous 16th-century relative Maarten van Heemskerck. Maarten Heemskerck van der Heck, as he called himself, probably worked in his father’s studio until the latter’s death in 1652. Another possible pupil was Caesar van Everdingen (1616/17-78). Paintings by Claes Jacobsz van der Heck are often wrongly ascribed to his cousin, Claes Dircksz van der Heck.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 247r, 300r; Houbraken II, 1719, pp. 7-8; Thieme/Becker XVI, 1923, p. 202; Wortel 1943; Huys Janssen 1997, pp. 26-28; De Vrij and De Vries in coll. cat. Alkmaar 1997, p. 144; Huys Janssen 2002, p. 30

Entry

Were it not signed and dated, it would be difficult to conceive that this Witches’ Sabbath was executed by an Alkmaar painter in 1636. While the monsters and demons are drawn from the repertoire of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the panoramic landscape with classical ruins resembles the work of Flemish artists active in Rome at the turn of the 16th century, such as Paulus Bril and Willem van Nieulandt II. The scene is presided over by a crowned demon in the form of a gigantic frog seated on a globe on a pedestal. Worshipping figures kneel before the pedestal. In the right foreground, other figures accompanied by cats, a priest and a sphinx-like creature, are shown kneeling in worship before candles. A procession of sorcerers occupies the centre foreground. Their number includes a woman with flayed arms riding a beast with multiple heads reminiscent of the creature on which the Whore of Babylon rides (Revelation 17:3). This parallel was probably intentional, as the Whore of Babylon was used to represent false religion – in an emblem by Alciato, for example.⁵ On the ruin on the left, a witch washes the back of a naked woman and another stirs a cauldron. More witches are shown flying in the sky around the obelisk, on the pedestal of which a demonic creature bares his buttocks, another blows a horn, and a third urinates into the open mouth of a creature sprawled out beneath the obelisk.

There are three other paintings by Van der Heck with compositions almost identical to that of the Rijksmuseum painting, which is dated 1636. One is in Châteauroux and is dated 1635.⁶ The other two were probably also executed in the 1630s. A version auctioned in Brussels in 1947 differs from the others in that it shows the Egyptian St Antony the Great in the lower left corner kneeling before an altar while being tempted by the devil in the guise of a woman.⁷ In the three other versions, including the one in the Rijksmuseum, St Antony has been replaced by figures in contemporary dress seated at a table making music and drinking.

Van der Heck was apparently fascinated by the themes of the witches’ sabbath and the temptation of St Antony throughout his career. From early 20th-century descriptions we know of two other paintings by him of the temptation of St Antony, one dated 1630 and the other 1649, that is towards the end of his career.⁸ Based on these descriptions, the 1630 painting probably resembled the Rijksmuseum panel, while that of 1649 was probably the one that was photographed around 1950 when it was in a private Dutch collection.⁹ The composition of that painting is completely different from the Rijksmuseum’s, and shows that Van der Heck had probably seen one of David Teniers the Younger’s many treatments of the theme. In a work in Brussels that is dated 1624, Van der Heck handled the theme of the witches’ sabbath in much the same way as in his paintings from the 1630s.¹⁰ On the basis of the Brussels painting it is possible to attribute to Van der Heck a Temptation of St Antony that was at auction in 1960 as the work of Paulus Bril.¹¹ According to a note written by Max Friedländer on a photograph of the painting preserved in the RKD, the work was dated 1601.¹² If the painting was indeed dated 1601, it would be Van der Heck’s earliest known work, which would mean that he painted his first Temptation of St Antony at the very beginning of his career. The basic composition of the 1636 Rijksmuseum painting, with such features as a ruin on the left and an obelisk, was already established in that painting. Also present there, as well as in the versions of 1624 and the 1630s, is a circle of figures dancing in front of an archway on the right. Like the latter works, the earliest one includes flying figures, but not the witches of the Rijksmuseum painting. Rather, St Antony is shown being plagued by demons in the manner of Martin Schongauer’s famous print.

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. 115.

Literature

Wortel 1943, p. 138, no. 17; Huys Janssen 1997, p. 28

Collection catalogues

1909, p. 375, no. 1118a (as Claes Dircksz van der Heck, Allegory of the Vices and their Consequences); 1976, p. 262, no. A 2373 (as Allegory of the Vices); 2007, no. 115

Citation

J. Bikker, 2007, 'Claes Jacobsz. van der Heck, Witches’ Sabbath, 1636', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7732

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