Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 134.5 cm × width 99.3 cm
outer size: depth 9 cm (support incl. frame)
Gerard van Honthorst (copy after)
Christ on the Cold Stone
after c. 1614
Technical notes
The support, a plain-weave canvas, has been enlarged on both sides by about 5 cm and lined. The ground is not visible. The paint is thickly applied and brushstrokes are visible throughout.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: L. Sozzani, RMA, 3 June 2002
Condition
Fair. The painting is abraded and old retouchings are visible. The varnish is very discoloured.
Provenance
...; Prof. Fiorentini, Rome, 1947;1 from whom, fl. 2,170, as Georges de la Tour, to the museum, through the mediation of G.J. Hoogewerff, 1948
Object number: SK-A-3569
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Gerard van Honthorst (Utrecht 1592 - Utrecht 1656)
Gerard van Honthorst was born in Utrecht on 4 November 1592 into a family of artists. His father, Herman Gerritsz van Honthorst, was a decorative painter and probably his first teacher. According to Von Sandrart and Houbraken, Honthorst trained with Abraham Bloemaert. When exactly he went to Italy is not known; a drawn copy after Caravaggio’s Martyrdom of St Peter in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo is dated 1616,2 indicating that he was in Rome by that year. His first documented painting, The Beheading of St John the Baptist, was executed for the Church of Santa Maria della Scala in 1617-18.3 Such Caravaggesque night scenes, which often include artificial sources of illumination, garnered Honthorst the nickname ‘Gherardo delle Notti’ in Italy. Among his Roman patrons were the Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani, in whose house Honthorst lived, and Cardinal Scipione Borghese.
A few months after his return to Utrecht in 1620, Honthorst married Sophia Coopmans. He joined the Guild of St Luke there and set up his own workshop. Von Sandrart, one of his apprentices in the 1620s, informs us that Honthorst had as many as 25 pupils at a time, from each of whom he received the sizable tuition fee of 100 guilders a year. With the exception of 1627, Honthorst served as dean of the guild between 1625 and 1630. It was also in the mid-1620s that he received his first commission from the court of Frederik Hendrik in The Hague.4 A commission from the British ambassador in The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, for Lord Arundel came as early as 16205 and eventually led to the invitation from Charles I to work on Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1628.6 Honthorst returned to the United Provinces the same year, but continued to work for the English court in the years to come. In 1630 he became court painter to the exiled King and Queen of Bohemia, Frederick V and Elizabeth, in The Hague. Honthorst also painted numerous portraits of the Stadholder and his wife, Amalia van Solms, and took part in the decoration of, among others, the palaces Honselaarsdijk, Huis ter Nieuburch (1636-39) and Huis ten Bosch (1649-50). In order to accommodate his work in The Hague, he set up a second workshop there in 1637 and joined the guild, serving as dean in 1640. Also in 1637, he became the principal artist to decorate the Banqueting Hall in Kronborg Castle for King Christian IV of Denmark. Honthorst was, perhaps, the most internationally successful Dutch artist of his time. Despite, or possibly as a result of this success, his late style was criticized as ‘stiff ’ and ‘slick’ (‘stijve gladdicheyt’) and he was esteemed a ‘much less great master than themselves’ (‘beaucoup moins grand maistre qu’eux’) by his fellow artists working on the Oranjezaal.7 He died on 27 April 1656 and was buried in the Catharijnekerk in Utrecht.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Mancini c. 1620, fol. 86 (Judson/Ekkart 1999, p. 47); Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 22, 102, 172-74; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 149-50; Braun 1966, pp. 7-59, 340-88 (documents); Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 276-79; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, pp. 382-83; Judson/Ekkart 1999, pp. XXXIII-XXXIV, 1-24
Entry
The schematic treatment of the anatomy and chiaroscuro is the likely reason why the present painting was associated with Georges de La Tour in the past.8 A more accomplished version of the painting in Dordogne9 has also been attributed to De la Tour in the past.10 As Judson was first able to demonstrate, both versions show the figure of Christ from Honthorst’s Christ Crowned with Thorns in the J. Paul Getty Museum (fig. a), which he convincingly dates to the artist’s Italian period, namely about 1614.11 A large candle has been added to both compositions as the source of the illumination of the figure. Sterling, who did not know the Getty picture, as it was acquired by the museum in 1990 and was only published for the first time in 1993, considered the Rijksmuseum painting to be a copy of the one in Dordogne.12 Although the ultimate source of the figure is now known, it remains more likely, on account of the inferior quality and inclusion of the candle, that this painting was copied from the version in Dordogne and not directly from the Getty painting. Sterling also suggested the Rijksmuseum painting could be a youthful work by Matthias Stom.13 Such an attribution, however, cannot be sustained.
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. 149.
Literature
Judson/Ekkart 1999, p. 83, no. 59, copy 1, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1976, p. 339, no. A 3569 (as manner of Georges de La Tour); 1992, p. 58, no. A 3569; 2007, no. 149
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'copy after Gerard van Honthorst, Christ on the Cold Stone, after c. 1614', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5601
(accessed 19 September 2024 19:18:25).