Object data
oil on panel
support: height 92.3 cm × width 76 cm
outer size: depth 4.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Willem van der Vliet
Portrait of a Boy
1638
Inscriptions
- signature, date and inscription, bottom left, on the rock: Æta: 1 1/2 aº 1638. / w. van der vliet fecit.
Technical notes
The support consists of three vertically grained oak planks and is bevelled on the bottom. A thin, whitish, rather transparent ground layer is followed by smoothly applied paint layers. A thicker paint was used for the flowers.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 16 February 2005
Condition
Fair. There are small, old, stable cracks here and there. Some paint is loose along the join at bottom right. There is severe abrasion at various points, a fair number of small paint losses, and quite a lot of discoloured retouching. The varnish is also discoloured.
Conservation
- M. van de Laar, 1998: loose paint consolidated; retouched and revarnished
Original framing
A stripped oak truncated box frame1
Provenance
...; collection Cornelis Hoogendijk (1866-1911), The Hague;2 from whom on loan to the museum, 1907-11; donated to the museum from his estate, 1912
Object number: SK-A-2577
Credit line: Gift of the heirs of C. Hoogendijk, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Willem van der Vliet (Delft c. 1584 - Delft 1642)
Willem Willemsz van der Vliet was born in Delft around 1584, and lived and worked there all his life. The name of his teacher is not known. He joined the Guild of St Luke in 1615, and became its dean in 1633. He married Maria Jacobsdr Storm van Wena in 1618, but it emerges from a notarized document that he was already a widower by 3 March 1622. It was not until 1636 that he remarried, his bride being Jannitge Heyndricxs van Buyren. He died in Delft on 6 December 1642.
Van der Vliet painted both history and genre pieces in a Caravaggesque style, as well as portraits. His earliest known dated work is A Smoker and a Man Eating of 1624.3 Van der Vliet is also documented as a cloth merchant, but he was probably mainly active as a painter. That is clear not only from his almost unbroken output but also from the sidelines typical of an artist, like authenticating paintings. It is known, for instance, that in 1621 he and Michiel van Mierevelt appraised a copy by the portraitist Hubert Jacobsz Grimani. Van der Vliet was the teacher of his nephew Hendrick Cornelisz van der Vliet (c. 1611-75), another Delft painter.
Everhard Korthals Altes, 2007
References
Van Bleyswijck 1667, pp. 851-52; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 121; Thieme/Becker XXXIV, 1934, p. 464; Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1987, p. 345; Wansink 1987, pp. 3-10; Liedtke in New York-London 2001, pp. 56-57
Entry
This little boy is 18 months old, according to the inscription on the stone block on the left. He is wearing a remarkably large hat of a type that was mainly worn by adult men. However, it was also used by women and by young boys, although probably not by girls.4 In his left hand he is holding an ornate jingle-bell. Some authors have seen a symbolic significance in the stone block beside him, the basket of flowers and the ivy twining around the tree on the right. The flowers may allude not only to youth and blossoming, but also to the fleeting nature of life.5 Ivy stands for love and devotion, while the rocks that are sometimes found in the background of portraits were often associated with constancy.6
There are signed portraits in Willem van der Vliet’s oeuvre from 1624 on, when the artist was already 40 years old. Prior to that he concentrated almost entirely on history paintings and genre pieces. He has some 35 portraits to his name, mostly of Delft citizens. In the period 1628-38 he produced a few children’s portraits and this unidentified boy probably came from a well-to-do Delft family. Around his neck he has a chain with a black cross bearing the letters ‘IHS’, indicating that his family was Catholic, of which the town had a relatively large number around this time.7
There is a smaller version of this painting, also signed and dated 1638, in which one sees considerably more of the tree on the right.8
Everhard Korthals Altes, 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. 317.
Literature
Ekkart in Haarlem-Antwerp 2000, p. 164, no. 33
Collection catalogues
1934, p. 304, no. 2568a; 1960, p. 330, no. 2568 D 1; 1976, p. 582, no. A 2577; 2007, no. 317
Citation
E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'Willem van der Vliet, Portrait of a Boy, 1638', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6465
(accessed 10 November 2024 09:54:20).