The Entombment

c. 1640 - 1652

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 74.6 cm × width 59.5 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, lower right, on a rock: Cŭijp

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of two vertically grained oak planks (30.2 and 29.3 cm). It was thinned to approx. 0.5 cm and cradled (cradle now removed). Two large, thin, cross-grain blocks have been attached across the join. The reverse was subsequently bevelled on all sides and coated with wax.
Preparatory layers The smooth double ground extends up to the edges of the support. The first, off-white layer primarily fills the grain of the wood, and is followed by a thin, dark, brownish ground consisting of white pigment particles with an addition of dark brown earth particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends partially over the edges of the support. The light areas of the background were thinly applied first, leaving the upper ground exposed to serve as a mid-tone. The pale background consists of mainly white with many bright orange-pink and large pale yellow pigment particles. The highlights of the figures were freely executed with impasted, opaque, creamy white paint, followed by thin, dark and sketchy lines to accentuate the shadows. On top of this a semi-transparent dark brown glaze was applied over most of the surface to create the shadows in the background and to complete the modelling of the forms. The varying thickness of the rich, unctuous paint (both light and dark) creates the gradations in tone. The colouring is warm and monochromatic. Cross-sections show that a palette of black, white and earth pigments was used, with a few grey-blue glassy shards to increase the transparency of the paint.
Emma Boyce, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: E. Boyce, RMA, nos. SK-A-2857/1-2, 7 May 2010
technical report: E. Boyce, RMA, 11 May 2010

Condition

Fair. The support has become slightly concave. The ground and paint layers are cracked along the entire length of the joins. Two cracks in the support, and in the ground and paint layers, run along the grain and are aligned with the edges of the blocks. Retouchings of small ground and paint losses in areas along the join and edges have become matte and are slightly discoloured. The thick varnish, although still evenly glossy, has yellowed significantly and is cracked, and offers only limited saturation.

Provenance

…; sale, S.C. Goldsmid (†), Charles Turner (1773-1853) and ‘old pictures from various sources’ [anonymous section], London (Christie’s), 24 January 1919, no. 138;…; anonymous sale, London (Christie’s), 22 December 1920, no. 149, £42, to Malaart;¹…; anonymous sale, Amsterdam (Mak van Waay), 4 April 1921, no. 25, fl. 37;²…; purchased from the dealer W. Komter by the museum, as a gift from the Fotocommissie, 1921

Object number: SK-A-2857

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop

The artist

Benjamin Gerritsz Cuyp (Dordrecht 1612 - Dordrecht 1652)

Benjamin Gerritsz Cuyp was baptized in Dordrecht on 1 December 1612 as the second son of the glass-painter Gerrit Gerritsz Cuyp and his second wife Everijnken Albertsdr. He was the half-brother of Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, who according to Houbraken taught both him and his cousin Aelbert Cuyp. Although there are stylistic and formal influences from the early Rembrandt in particular, it is both undocumented and unlikely that Benjamin Cuyp trained with him. On 27 January 1631 he was registered as a journeyman in the Dordrecht Guild of St Luke, and swore his oath on 30 December 1632, a little under two years later. He is recorded in the town until the end of 1641, but would not have stayed there for much longer, for in July 1643 he was living in The Hague. He may have been back in Dordrecht briefly in late July 1644, soon after his father’s death. On 29 July 1645 he signed a document in Utrecht, where he settled in the second half of the 1640s. In 1649 no fewer than 17 of his paintings and 14 copies after his works were sold in the lottery run by Jan de Bondt in Wijk bij Duurstede, south-east of Utrecht. Cuyp was back in Dordrecht in 1652, where he made his last will on 16 August. He was buried in the Grote Kerk on 28 August.

Cuyp made cavalry skirmishes, peasant scenes and beach views. His history pieces deal with mythological and allegorical subjects, but above all with stories from the New Testament. He was very productive, which is all the more remarkable in the light of his early death. None of his paintings bear a date.³

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, pp. 248-49; F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], I, Rotterdam 1877-78, p. 208; ibid., II, 1879-80, pp. 87-90; ibid., V, 1882-83, pp. 176-77, 179, 182; G.H. Veth, ‘Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp en Benjamin Cuyp’, Oud Holland 2 (1884), pp. 233-90, esp. pp. 234-35, 253-55; G.H. Veth, ‘Aanteekeningen omtrent eenige Dordrechtsche schilders, XIII: Benjamin Gerritz. Cuyp’, Oud Holland 6 (1888), pp. 141-42; Lilienfeld in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, VIII, Leipzig 1913, p. 229; W. Veerman, ‘Cuyp, een Dordtse kunstenaarsfamilie’, in J.G. van Gelder et al., Aelbert Cuyp en zijn familie: Schilders te Dordrecht, exh. cat. Dordrecht (Dordrechts Museum) 1977-78, pp. 11-21, esp. pp. 17-18; P. Huys Janssen, ‘Pieter van Laer, Benjamin Cuyp, Gerard Douffet and Karel Dujardin in Utrecht’, Mercury, no. 11 (1990), pp. 53-56

Entry

Christ’s entombment is described in all four gospels (Matthew 27:59-61; Mark 15:45-47; Luke 23:53-56; John 19:39-42). Joseph of Arimathea received the lifeless body from Pilate, wrapped it in a fragrant shroud, and with the aid of Nicodemus and in the presence of the three Marys placed it in a tomb hollowed out of the rock. From the second half of the sixteenth century the scene was often set in a cave-like space with a view of the outside world,⁴ as is the case in this signed painting. Benjamin Cuyp depicted the subject at least three times,⁵ which makes it impossible to say whether the ‘burial of Jesus Christ’ listed in the 1685 probate inventory of Abraham Heyblom of Dordrecht is the panel now in the Rijksmuseum.⁶

The composition with its pronounced diagonals and the animated gestures of the bystanders recur regularly in Cuyp’s oeuvre, as in two versions of a Raising of Lazarus.⁷ The strange flaxen yellow with which he made the figures stand out against the darkness and the sketchy technique of stripy brushstrokes are typical of the artist’s work of the 1640s.⁸ That was also the period when he usually omitted the initials of his Christian names from his signature. In its technique the Amsterdam picture is close to both a Resurrection that was auctioned in 1995,⁹ and the version of Raising of Lazarus kept in St Petersburg,¹⁰ all three of which are roughly the same size. Ember has stated that the latter painting is the companion piece of the one in the Rijksmuseum, but its wooden support would appear to rule that out.¹¹

Ember has suggested that Cuyp based his painting on Rembrandt’s drawing of the entombment of Christ, which is on top of a Raising of Lazarus.¹² Leaving aside the compositional differences, it is unlikely that he ever saw that sheet. What the present work does demonstrate, once again, is Cuyp’s familiarity with Rembrandt’s idiom. The chiaroscuro makes the lifeless body the focal point of the scene, just as Rembrandt did in his Entombment, which was part of the Passion series that he made for Stadholder Frederik Hendrik at the end of the 1630s.¹³ As in that picture, Cuyp placed the Virgin in the foreground together with a woman who is probably the mourning Mary Magdalen. The latter’s headdress is strikingly similar to that of her counterpart in Rembrandt’s Entombment. The way in which the bystanders are set as dark silhouettes against the illuminated background and the dramatic effect of this device immediately recall Rembrandt’s etched Raising of Lazarus of around 1632.¹⁴ The restless brushwork, chiaroscuro and bright highlights in the figures are also related to the oeuvre of Leonaert Bramer.¹⁵

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

I. Ember, ‘Benjamin Gerritsz. Cuyp (1612-1652)’, Acta Historiae Artium 25 (1979), pp. 89-141, esp. pp. 120-21

Collection catalogues

1934, p. 78, no. 752a; 1976, p. 185, no. A 2857

Citation

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022, 'Benjamin Gerritsz. Cuyp, The Entombment, c. 1640 - 1652', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8196

(accessed 8 January 2025 16:00:29).