Object data
oil on panel
support: height 71.1 cm × width 60 cm × thickness 1.4 cm
outer size: depth 4.5 cm (support incl. frame)
David Bailly
Portrait of Anthony de Wale (1573-1639)
1636
Inscriptions
- inscription and date, upper right: Ætatis 63 Aº 1636
Technical notes
The support consists of three vertically grained oak planks and is bevelled on all sides. The colour of the ground is white. There is visible brushmarking in the face and hands. The reserves for the head and the collar are plainly visible.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 12 October 2004
Condition
Fair. The painting is quite abraded overall, except for the figure’s face. There are discoloured areas of retouching in the beard and the doublet. The varnish is also very discoloured.
Provenance
...; Galleria Crespi, Milan, 1900-12;1 sale, Galleria Crespi, Paris (Trotti et al.), 4 June 1914, no. 91, fr. 2,940, to the museum, with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt; on loan to the Stedelijk Museum, Leiden, 1925-37
Object number: SK-A-2717
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
David Bailly (Leiden c. 1584/86 - Leiden 1657)
David Bailly was the son of a calligrapher and fencing-master who had emigrated to Leiden from Antwerp. According to the Leiden city chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers – the principal source for information on the artist – Bailly was born in 1584, although later documents indicate that it was 1586. He was first apprenticed in Leiden to the otherwise unknown surgeon and painter Adriaen Verburgh, before becoming Cornelis van der Voort’s pupil in Amsterdam, to which his family had moved in 1602. In the winter of 1608, Bailly embarked on a five year trip, first spending a year in Hamburg and then travelling by way of Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Augsburg and other towns to Rome and Venice. On his return to Leiden, which he reached in 1613, he once again travelled through Germany working for local princely courts, such as that of the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. No works have survived from the period before his return to Leiden, where he established himself as a portraitist. From between 1621 and 1633 he executed numerous meticulous, small-scale drawings of Leiden professors and students, as well as fellow artists like Jan Pynas. His earliest signed and dated painting is the Rijksmuseum’s Portrait of Aertje Witsen of 1626 (SK-A-16). After 1633, Bailly apparently concentrated on portrait painting, as there are few drawings from after that date. In addition to Leiden citizens, his sitters included such Amsterdam patricians as Pieter Dircksz Hasselaer and Gerrit Pietersz Schaep. His greatest contribution to 17th-century Dutch art is his combination of portraiture and vanitas still lifes, which reached a high point in his last dated painting, the 1651 Self-Portrait with Vanitas Still Life.2
Relatively late in life, in 1642, Bailly married Agneta van Swanenburgh. In 1648, he was among the founding members of the Leiden Guild of St Luke, becoming its dean the following year. A few months prior to his death in 1657, Bailly took on the lucrative position of steward to the Theological College of the States of Holland and West Friesland. His known pupils were his nephews, the still-life painters Harmen (1612-after 1655) and Pieter van Steenwijck (c. 1615-after 1654).
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Orlers 1641, pp. 371-72; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 190; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 118; Obreen V, 1882-83, pp. 41, 172, 185, 187-89, 196, 242; Moes in Thieme/Becker II, 1908, p. 372; Bruyn 1951, pp. 150-56; De Baar 1973; De Baar 1975; Trauzeddel in Saur VI, 1992, pp. 320-21
Entry
The sitter’s identity is inscribed on a 1636 engraving by Salomon Savery after the present portrait (RP-P-OB-5594, see fig. a). Antonius Walaeus (Anthony de Wale) hailed from Ghent.3 After studying at Leiden between 1596 and 1599 and journeying through France, Switzerland and Germany, he became a minister in Koudekerke near Middelburg in 1602 and, in 1605, in Middelburg itself. Walaeus also taught theology at the Middelburg Latin School. A Counter-Remonstrant, Walaeus was Prince Maurits’s court chaplain for a brief period in 1617, and in 1618-19 he attended the Synod of Dordrecht. He edited the final draft of the Canons of Dordt and later worked on the new Bible translation the synod had resolved to provide. The victory of the Counter-Remonstrants at the Synod of Dordrecht also resulted in the removal of Remonstrant professors from the theological department of Leiden University. In 1619, Walaeus was appointed to one of the vacated chairs and spent the next 20 years at the university, serving as rector magnificus between February 1625 and February 1627, and from February 1639 until his death in August of that year. Among his works is the Synopsis theologiae purioris (Synopsis of purer theology), which he co-authored with his fellow theologians at Leiden, and which formed the guidelines for the Counter-Remonstrant movement.
Bailly had already portrayed Walaeus in 1624 in a drawing that served as the model for an engraving by Crispijn de Passe published in J. Meursius’s Athenae Batavae.4 The sitter’s orientation in the Rijksmuseum painting allows for the possibility that it was originally accompanied by a pendant showing Walaeus’s wife Paschasia van Isenhout.5 No such pendant, however, is known today. The half-length composition, with the sitter’s arm resting as it were on the lower edge of the painting, was one employed by Bailly a number of times for his portrait drawings.6 As Bruyn has pointed out, the loose application of the paint and the impasted treatment of the hand and face suggest that Bailly may have had knowledge of Rembrandt’s portraits from this period.7
A copy after the present portrait is in the Academiegebouw at Leiden University.8
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. 17.
Literature
Bruyn 1951, p. 214
Collection catalogues
1918, p. 356, no. 407a; 1976, p. 95, no. A 2717; 2007, no. 17
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'David Bailly, Portrait of Anthony de Wale (1573-1639), 1636', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5877
(accessed 15 November 2024 02:42:44).