All works in Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum

Jan Lievens (follower of)

Bust of a Young Boy

in or after 1643

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 27.5 cm × width 20 cm
outer size: depth 5.5 cm (support incl. SK-L-1333)

Inscriptions

inscription, lower right (false): Rembrandt geretucee[rd] … Liev[ens] (Lievens reworked by Rembrandt)

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.5 cm thick. All edges have probably been slightly trimmed, as indicated by exposed tunnels of insect infestation and chipped-off paint and ground around the perimeter. The reverse has tool marks from the splitting of the wood into planks, and is bevelled at the bottom. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1626. The plank could have been ready for use by 1637, but a date in or after 1643 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends up to the trimmed edges of the support. The first, off-white glue layer is followed by a thin, translucent oil layer, or imprimatura.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the trimmed edges of the support. A first lay-in of the figure was done with a semi-translucent brown paint, indicating light and dark areas and introducing some volume. This undermodelling was partially left exposed, for instance in the mid-tones of the shadowed areas in the face and in the mid-tone of the clothing. The boy was executed first and then the background, which extends over the contours of his clothing on the left and right. While the background paint, which shows clear brushstrokes, was still wet, some additional hairs were partially placed on top and partially blended in. Limited definition was given to the clothing; the deepest shadows were indicated with black paint, while light brown was used for the lightest areas. A few faint green brushstrokes were applied to further model the figure’s garment. The grey added for the shadows of the face as well as the pink of the cheeks were visibly brushed out into the light pink flesh colours. Reddish-brown glazes accentuate the deepest shadows in the nostrils, eyes and mouth. A white, slightly impasted highlight was placed on the nose, displaying some brushmarking, and thick impasted paint was used for the ochre-coloured highlights in the hair.
Ige Verslype, 2025

Scientific examination and reports

X-radiography: RMA, no. De Wild 106, March 1930
X-radiography: RMA, no. 75, 10 April 1948
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 29 March 1995
X-radiography: A. Wallert, RMA, no. 1773, 28 December 2005
infrared photography: A. Wallert, RMA, January 2006
paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, nos. 132/1-3, 5 January 2006
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 January 2010

Literature scientific examination and reports

A. Wallert, ‘“Rembrandt geretucee... Lieve”?’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 54 (2006), pp. 122-29

Condition

Fair. The inscription in the lower right corner appears to have been added at a later date, as it flows into the craquelure of the underlying paint layers here and there. Several small retouchings are visible in UV light throughout the paint surface. The varnish is uneven and has severely yellowed.

Provenance

…; purchased from F. Negele, Munich, by the museum, 1909; on loan to Museum De Lakenhal, Leiden, 1956-76

Object number: SK-A-2391

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The artist

Jan Lievens (Leiden 1607 - Amsterdam 1674)

According to the account published by the Leiden burgomaster and town chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers in 1641, Jan Lievens was born on 24 October 1607 in Leiden. His parents were Lieven Hendricxz, an embroiderer, and Machtelt Jansdr van Noortsant. When he was 8, his father apprenticed him to the Leiden artist Joris van Schooten, ‘from whom he learned the principles of both drawing and painting’.¹ About two years later, in 1617 or 1618, the child prodigy was sent to study with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. Upon his return to Leiden at the age of 12 Lievens set up a studio in his father’s house. Although not documented and not mentioned by Orlers, the style of his early works suggests that Lievens probably also spent some time in Utrecht and possibly Antwerp in the early 1620s. Indeed, instead of the small-scale, multi-figure histories for which Lastman is well known, Lievens’s early output consists primarily of broadly rendered, large-scale compositions with only one or a few half-length figures, shown life-size or larger than life. Lievens’s choice of biblical, allegorical and genre subjects in the 1620s also reflects the influence of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, Gerard van Honthorst, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen, as well as that of the great Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. In addition to history and genre pieces, the young Leiden artist executed tronies, still lifes and portraits in this period, and became a talented printmaker. As his earliest signed and dated painting is from 1629,² the chronology of the first decade of his output has been, and still is, open to debate.

Lievens began working closely with Rembrandt after the latter arrived back in Leiden around 1625 from a six-month apprenticeship with Lastman in Amsterdam. While the notion that the two shared a studio in Leiden is not supported by the early accounts of their careers – in fact, Orlers explicitly states that Rembrandt ‘decided to engage in and practice the art of painting entirely on his own’ after his return – Lievens and Rembrandt often treated the same subject matter, for example Samson and Delilah, the raising of Lazarus and Christ on the Cross.³ The fijnschilders style that the two artists developed together in the second half of the 1620s was already making it difficult for appraisers and connoisseurs to differentiate their hands during their lifetimes. Lievens’s early work was much sought after, at first by Leiden patrons, including his earliest biographer, Orlers. In 1628, Lievens and Rembrandt were visited in their respective studios by the stadholder’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens, the most powerful cultural broker in the Dutch Republic. Lievens ingratiated himself with Huygens by requesting to paint his likeness,⁴ and soon thereafter the court in The Hague began to acquire his work and offer him commissions. Some of Lievens’s pictures were also acquired by Sir Robert Kerr, representative of the English crown in The Hague, and in 1631 the exiled king of Bohemia, Frederick V, and his consort Elizabeth, a sister of King Charles I of England, commissioned Lievens to portray their son Prince Charles Louis, who was studying in Leiden at the time.⁵

In February 1632, Lievens moved to London where, according to Orlers, he painted portraits of King Charles I and his family, as well as various lords. Those works have not survived and little is known about Lievens’s output and career during his English period, which lasted until 1635. It was perhaps Anthony van Dyck’s return to England in the spring of 1635 that prompted Lievens to leave for Antwerp, where he registered as a member of the Guild of St Luke in that year and acquired citizenship in December 1640. In 1638, he married Susanna de Nole, daughter of the sculptor Andries Colijns de Nole. His father-in-law’s connections may have helped Lievens secure the commissions for two large altarpieces for the Jesuit churches in Antwerp and Brussels.⁶ Also in this period Lievens carried out a commission for Stadholder Frederik Hendrik and painted a monumental Magnanimity of Scipio for the council chamber of Leiden Town Hall, for which he was paid 1,500 guilders and awarded a gold medal.⁷ Besides history pieces, Lievens executed tronies and genre scenes during his Antwerp period, and branched out in the field of painting to produce landscapes and in the graphic arts into the medium of the woodcut. He completely abandoned his early style in favour of one heavily indebted to Adriaen Brouwer, Van Dyck and Rubens.

In 1644, Lievens moved with his wife and child to Amsterdam, where he first rented a room as either living or studio space from the artist couple Jan Miense Molenaer and Judith Leyster. Susanna de Nole died shortly afterward and Lievens married Cornelia de Bray, daughter of an Amsterdam notary, in 1648. Probably in the same year, he was commissioned to paint one of the works, The Five Muses, for the cycle of allegories commemorating the life of Frederik Hendrik in the Oranjezaal (Orange Hall) in Huis ten Bosch, which was completed in 1650.⁸ Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms’s eldest daughter Louise Henriette married the Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, in 1646. In 1652, Lievens was invited to contribute to the decorations of their country seat, Schloss Oranienburg near Berlin. He moved there in 1653 and executed a large portrait historié of the couple as well as mythological scenes.⁹

Lievens returned to the Dutch Republic and resided in The Hague from 1654 until March 1659 at the latest. In 1656, he was involved in setting up Confrerie Pictura, a new painters’ confraternity that broke away from the local Guild of St Luke. Lievens received several important private and public commissions in these years, not only in The Hague but also in Amsterdam. For example, he was commissioned in 1655 to execute a large overmantel of Quintus Fabius Maximus and his Son for the burgomasters’ chamber of Amsterdam Town Hall, for which he was paid 1,500 guilders.¹⁰ Although he remained a non-resident member of the Confrerie Pictura in The Hague in 1660-61, Lievens moved back to Amsterdam by March 1659, probably with an eye to securing the commission for the series of eight monumental paintings for the lunettes of the Burgerzaal (Citizens’ Hall) in the Town Hall. After Govert Flinck, who had been awarded that project, died in 1660 before being able to execute them, Lievens was given the task of painting one of the lunettes, Brinio Raised on a Shield, for which he earned 1,200 guilders.¹¹ Another important assignment in the 1660s was for an enormous Mars (Allegory of War) for Pieter Post’s newly constructed Statenzaal, the assembly room of the States of Holland and West Friesland in the Binnenhof in The Hague.¹² Lievens completed this canvas in 1664 and in the same year set off for Cleves, probably in the hope of being selected to work on the decorations of Johan Maurits of Nassau’s newly renovated Schwanenburg Castle, another architectural project based on designs by Pieter Post. Lievens’s sojourn in Cleves is veiled in mystery and it is only known that by the spring of 1666 he was back in Amsterdam, where he remained until 1669. He spent the last five years of his life constantly on the move, living alternately in The Hague, Leiden and Amsterdam. Due at least in part to non-payments by some of his patrons, which was exacerbated by the economic malaise brought on by the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74), Lievens experienced financial problems during much of his later career and died in poverty in Amsterdam in June 1674.

Throughout his career Lievens had several pupils, none of whom became significant artists in their own right. It was probably as early as his Leiden period that he instructed his younger brother Dirk (c. 1612-1650), who is known to have executed a few portraits around 1640. The otherwise obscure Hans van den Wijngaerde, who trained with Lievens in Antwerp for six years beginning in 1636, is his earliest documented pupil. According to Houbraken, who does not specify where the apprenticeship took place, Hendrik Schoock (1630-1707) from Utrecht was with Lievens after having studied with Abraham Bloemaert and before going on to Jan Davidsz de Heem. Based on Schoock’s date of birth, this would have been either in Antwerp, where De Heem was also active, or in Amsterdam shortly after Lievens moved there in 1644. In 1662, Erick van den Weerelt (1648-1715) was apprenticed by the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage to Lievens for a period of three years. The contract was extended for another three years in 1665. Lievens’s use of student help to execute some of his works is documented. According to his own testimony, his eldest son, Jan Andrea (1644-1680), painted the 1666 Geographer, an overmantel in the Gemeenlandshuis of the Rijnland polder board in Leiden, after his father’s design and with his assistance.¹³ He is also recorded in Lievens’s studio in Amsterdam in 1669 together with two Jewish assistants, Aron de Chavez (c. 1647-1705) and Jacob Cardoso Ribero (c. 1643-?), and a wealthy amateur, Jonas Witsen (1647-1675). Lievens’s last documented pupil was Dionys Godijn (c. 1652/57-after c. 1682), whose father apprenticed him to the master in The Hague for a period of two years beginning in 1670.

From contemporary sources it appears that Lievens was rather arrogant. Huygens detected this personality defect even in the youthful artist: ‘My only objection is his stubbornness, which derives from an excess of self-confidence’.¹⁴ Judging from a remark made by Sir Robert Kerr in a 1654 letter to his son, Lievens retained a sense of excessive self-esteem in his maturity as well: ‘[he] has so high a conceit of himself that he thinks there is none to be compared with him in all Germany, Holland, nor the rest of the seventeen provinces.’¹⁵

Jonathan Bikker, 2025

References
J.J. Orlers, Beschrijving der stad Leyden, Leiden 1641, pp. 375-77; P. Angel, Lof der Schilderkonst, Leiden 1642 – trans. M. Hoyle and annot. H. Miedema, ‘Philips Angel, Praise of Painting’, Simiolus 24 (1996), pp. 227-58, esp. pp. 245-46; J. von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675: Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. A.R. Peltzer, Munich 1925 (ed. princ. Nuremberg 1675), p. 186; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, pp. 212, 296-301; P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, onder zinspreuk ‘Wt jonsten versaemt’, II, Antwerp/The Hague 1876, pp. 61, 69, 139; F.J.P. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, Antwerp 1883, pp. 863-66; J.A. Worp, ‘Constantijn Huygens over de schilders van zijn tijd’, Oud Holland 9 (1891), pp. 106-36, esp. pp. 125-31; E.W. Moes, ‘Jan Lievens’, Leids Jaarboekje 4 (1907), pp. 136-64; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, I, The Hague 1915, pp. 186-227; Schneider in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXIII, Leipzig 1929, pp. 214-15; H. Schneider, Jan Lievens: Sein Leben und seine Werke, Haarlem 1932, pp. 1-10, 277-85, 289-303; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986, pp. 1764-72; J. Bruyn, ‘Review of W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986’, Oud Holland 102 (1988), pp. 322-33, esp. pp. 327-28; E. Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, IV, Brussels 1989, p. 224, no. 1034; R. de Jager, ‘Meester, leerjongen, leertijd: Een analyse van zeventiende-eeuwse Noord-Nederlandse leerlingcontracten van kunstschilders, goud- en zilversmeden’, Oud Holland 104 (1990), pp. 69-111, esp. pp. 74, 98-99, doc. nos. 11, 12, 15, p. 102, doc. no. 31; P.J.M. de Baar and I.W.L. Moerman, ‘Rembrandt van Rijn en Jan Lievens, inwoners van Leiden’, in C. Vogelaar et al., Rembrandt & Lievens in Leiden: ‘Een jong en edel schildersduo’/Rembrandt & Lievens in Leiden: ‘A Pair of Young and Noble Painters’, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) 1991-92, pp. 24-38; E. Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, V, Brussels 1991, pp. 100-01; Domela Nieuwenhuis in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XIX, New York 1996, pp. 347-50; J.G.C.A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, pp. 352-53; A.K. Wheelock Jr, ‘Jan Lievens: Bringing New Light to an Old Master’, in A.K. Wheelock Jr et al., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Milwaukee (Milwaukee Art Museum)/Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2008-09, pp. 1-27

Entry

The most interesting aspect of this bust-length painting of a chubby-cheeked young boy with long curly hair is that it is inscribed ‘Rembrandt geretucee[rd] ... Liev[ens]’, implying that Rembrandt reworked and improved upon an original picture by Jan Lievens. However, the inscription is false, as first pointed out by Ekkart and conclusively proven by Wallert following a thorough technical examination.¹⁶ The most important finding discovered with the stereomicroscope was that the black paint of the inscription was applied over the craquelure of the original paint layer.¹⁷ The forger probably got the idea for the falsification from the inscriptions on three etchings by Rembrandt, which are reworkings of etchings by Lievens. One of those, for example, reads ‘Rembrandt geretuckert’.¹⁸ Another source for the counterfeiter may have been some of the entries in Rembrandt’s 1656 estate inventory, such as ‘Een vanitas van Rembrant geretukeert’.¹⁹

The inscription, which turned the work into an important document of the two young painters’ artistic relationship in Leiden, was obviously added to the picture to increase its market value. Wallert has mistakenly claimed that Bust of a Young Boy suddenly surfaced in 1893, the year in which the eminent French scholar Émile Michel published his important monograph on Rembrandt.²⁰ According to Wallert, who accused Michel of having had a hand in forging the inscription,²¹ the painting confirmed the Frenchman’s judgement that ‘these various features of costume and lighting lead one to suspect that this is one of the studies made jointly with Rembrandt, or at least was inspired by him’.²² Michel, however, does not discuss the present work in this passage – nor anywhere else in his book – but rather the now lost, life-size painting of a man wearing a beret and fantasy costume reading in front of a fire that the Leiden city magistrate and historian Jan Jansz Orlers said Stadholder Frederik Hendrik gave to the English ambassador.²³ Nor was the French scholar’s judgement of Lievens as negative as the quotation above might lead one to suspect when read out of context. Michel was the first art historian to make use of Constantijn Huygens’s recently rediscovered autobiographical sketch in a discussion of the artistic relationship between Lievens and Rembrandt. Unlike earlier scholars, such as Thoré and Vosmaer,²⁴ he did not view Lievens as a pupil of Rembrandt, but rather, based on the information contained in Huygens’s autobiographical fragment, considered the two young painters to be on the same level during their Leiden years: ‘both were seekers, full of imagination, setting their sights high in their art’ and ‘With the same precocity, both were equally industrious’.²⁵ Michel made a clear distinction between Lievens and Rembrandt’s actual pupils, such as Gerrit Dou, with whom ‘relations were not on the footing of complete equality’.²⁶

The painting did not suddenly emerge out of nowhere in 1893, but in 1909, when it was purchased by the Rijksmuseum from a certain F. Negele in Munich, and it did much to reverse Michel’s concept of Lievens as equal to Rembrandt. Kurt Erasmus, the first author to discuss Bust of a Young Boy, stated for example: ‘Thus we have the interesting case in which Rembrandt worked on a picture by a painter much under his influence – possibly even a pupil of his – and testified to the fact by placing his signature upon it.’²⁷ Schneider and Bauch were of the opinion that Rembrandt reworked not only this picture, but also several others, among them the early Lievens masterpiece St Paul in Kingston.²⁸

Beginning with Erasmus, most scholars believed that Rembrandt added at least the thick highlights to the boy’s hair, which gave the painting, in Schneider’s words, ‘packendes Leben’ (gripping life).²⁹ Hofstede de Groot thought he was also responsible for the present background,³⁰ but Bauch’s ideas on what Rembrandt altered in the composition were the most elaborate of all. He believed the picture would initially have resembled an etching of a young boy attributed to Lievens by some art historians, both works being based on a drawing that is no longer extant.³¹ Not only did Rembrandt add highlights to the hair, he substantially changed the figure’s face and body, whereby ‘everything begins to breathe’.³² However, as Wallert’s examination of the infrared photograph, X-radiograph and paint samples taken of Bust of a Young Boy has revealed, neither the hair, nor the background, nor any other passages have been overpainted.³³

After Ekkart published his misgivings about the inscription, a few scholars still gave it credence, linking the work to the description of a painting by Lievens in Lambert Jacobsz’s posthumous 1637 shop inventory of ‘een jongers troni met lanck kruil haijr [en] bolle blancke wangen’ (A boy’s head with long curly hair and round white cheeks).³⁴ This entry does not really provide any evidence for the inscription’s authenticity, which is also not supported by the technical data. Moreover, dendrochronology indicated that Bust of a Young Boy was probably made after 1637, the year in which Jacobsz’s inventory was drawn up. The panel could have been ready for use in 1637 but would most likely have been available only in 1643.³⁵

Ekkart not only doubted the validity of the inscription but also rejected Lievens’s authorship, regarding it instead as the work of an anonymous Rembrandt follower, executed decades after the previously assumed dating to around 1630.³⁶ Sumowski, on the other hand, attributed it to Lievens, comparing it with and illustrating it next to his Self-Portrait in a private collection.³⁷ While the latter picture was most likely made in Lievens’s Leiden period,³⁸ the dating of Bust of a Young Boy suggested by the dendrochronology places it in a period when Lievens employed a very different style. Sumowski’s comparison is nonetheless apt, although the highlights in the boy’s hair were applied with far less sophistication than in the Self-Portrait and the overall execution is rather primitive. There are several extant tronies of young boys attributed to Lievens,³⁹ which leaves open the possibility that the Rijksmuseum picture may reproduce a no longer extant original by that artist.

Jonathan Bikker, 2025

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

K. Erasmus, ‘Sammlungen: Amsterdam’, Der Cicerone 1 (1909), pp. 570-72, esp. p. 571 (as Lievens reworked by Rembrandt); C. Hofstede de Groot, ‘Rembrandt’s onderwijs aan zijne leerlingen’, in Feestbundel, Abraham Bredius aangeboden den achttienden April 1915, I, Amsterdam 1915, pp. 79-94, esp. p. 85 (as Lievens reworked by Rembrandt); H. Schneider, Jan Lievens: Sein Leben und seine Werke, Haarlem 1932, pp. 25, 143-44, no. 221 (as Lievens reworked by Rembrandt); K. Bauch, ‘Rembrandt und Lievens’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 11 (1939), pp. 239-68, esp. p. 246 (as Lievens reworked by Rembrandt); H. Schneider and R.E.O. Ekkart, Jan Lievens: Sein Leben und seine Werke, Amsterdam 1973, pp. 308, 332, no. 221 (as Rembrandt follower); W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986, p. 1804, no. 1274 (as Lievens), with earlier literature; A. Wallert, ‘“Rembrandt geretucee... Lieve”?’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 54 (2006), pp. 122-29 (without attribution); B. Schnackenburg, Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the Young Rembrandt: With a Catalogue Raisonné of his Early Leiden Works 1623-1632, Petersberg 2016, p. 450, no. A 9 (as Lievens)

Collection catalogues

1934, p. 167, no. 1461a (as Lievens reworked by Rembrandt); 1976, p. 472, no. A 2391 (as Rembrandt school); 1992, p. 77, no. A 2391 (as Rembrandt school)

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2025, 'follower of Jan Lievens, Bust of a Young Boy, in or after 1643', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20026161

(accessed 9 December 2025 04:49:23).