Portrait of Govert van Slingelandt (1623-1690), with his First Wife Christina van Beveren (1632-1656) and their Two Children

1657

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 100.3 cm × width 86.8 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower right: Joan: Mijtens f. / a°: 1657.

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax lined and was transferred onto a slightly larger stretcher. All tacking edges have been removed. Wide cusping is visible at the top and bottom and on the right.
Preparatory layers The single, warm white ground extends up to the current edges of the support. It consists of white pigment with an addition of earth pigments.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the current edges of the support. A sketchy initial lay-in done in black, grey, ochre and umber colours is visible beneath thin, loosely executed dark areas and transparent light passages of the composition. The painting was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light, leaving reserves for the tree, figures and dog. Infrared photography revealed dark edges of reserves at the contours of Christina van Beveren’s dress, to some extent also visible with the naked eye. The landscape was thinly and sketchily rendered, with individual leaves extending over the sky. Adjacent forms overlap here and there; the skirt of the white dress, for example, was partly added on top of the landscape, both on the left (hip level) and near the dog’s nose. The skin and facial features were blended wet in wet, with carefully modelled and defined transitions in brown and black. The loosely executed fabrics were constructed from mid-tones with impasted highlights, especially in the satins, and deepened with dark contours. The robe of the man was covered with a thin, red glaze. The dress worn by Barthout van Slingelandt, the standing boy, was underpainted with impasted whites. His right arm was initially planned lower down, and the cloth of baby Christina originally extended above her left shoulder. Slight adjustments were also made to the fingers of Govert van Slingelandt’s right hand and to his boot, which was shifted to the right.
Gwen Tauber, 2023

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, no. 126/2 1 (scraping: PLM, XRD, XRF), 13 July 2005
infrared photography: G. Tauber, RMA, 12 February 2009
paint samples: G. Tauber, RMA, nos. SK-A-4013/1-2, 12 February 2009
technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 12 February 2009

Condition

Fair. The paint in the thinner sections is slightly abraded. Discoloured retouching is visible here and there.

Conservation

M. Zeldenrust, 1985: varnish removed; retouched
L. Sozzani, 1991: an old retouching removed, filled and retouched; old discoloured retouchings corrected

Provenance

? Commissioned by the sitters; ? their son, Barthout des H.R. Rijksbaron van Slingelandt (1654-1711), Dordrecht; his son, Govert des H.R. Rijksbaron van Slingelandt (1692-1767), Dordrecht, with all family portraits;¹ his brother, Hendrik des H.R. Rijksbaron van Slingelandt (1702-1759), or the latter’s wife, Maria Katharina van der Burch (1707-1761), 3 Korte Vijverberg, The Hague, with all family portraits (‘de origineele portretten van Govert van Slingelandt Hr Barthoutsz. en Christina van Beveren met haar twee kinderen geschilderd in een schoorsteenstuk in de Eetzaal door Johan Mijtens, 1657’);² their probate inventory, 1761 (‘een groot stuk kunstig geschilderd door Johan Mijtens ao 1657, waarin verbeeld worden de Pourtraitten van Govert van Slingelandt Heeren Barthouts soon en zijns Huisvrouwe Christina de Beveren, met haere 2 kinderen genaamt Barthout, en Christina van Slingelandt, zijnde de laatste zeer jong overleden 11 dec: 1656. aet: 2. maanden’);³ ? their son, Barthout des H.R. Rijksbaron van Slingelandt (1731-1798), Dordrecht; ? his son, Baron Hendrik van Slingelandt (1788-1868), The Hague; ? his son, Baron Jacob van Slingelandt (1822-1878), The Hague;…; collection J.J. Thole, Huizen;⁴ anonymous sale [section J.J. Thole], Amsterdam (Mak van Waay), 22 (23) December 1942 sqq., no. 22 (‘Portrait of a family’);…; private collection, Düsseldorf, 1942-44;⁵…; acquired for Adolf Hitler’s Führermuseum, Linz (inv. no. 3813), through the mediation of the Dorotheum, Vienna;⁶…; war recuperation, SNK, 31 July 1946 (inv. no. NK 1792); on loan from the DRVK to the museum, 21 February 1955 (inv. no. SK-C-1447); transferred to the museum, 24 February 1960

Object number: SK-A-4013

The artist

Jan Mijtens (The Hague c. 1613/14 - The Hague 1670)

Jan Mijtens was born in The Hague at the end of 1613 or in January 1614 as the son of David Mijtens and Judith Hennicx. His father was a saddler and a member of the prosperous middle class. The extended family came from Flanders originally and produced numerous painters who remained active in various European countries until the eighteenth century. Jan Mijtens very probably started his apprenticeship with his uncle Isaac Mijtens and trained in all likelihood briefly with the latter’s elder brother, Daniel Mijtens, who returned to The Hague in 1635 after many years in England.

In 1639 Mijtens registered as a master painter with the Guild of St Luke in The Hague. His earliest dated pictures, two group portraits, are from 1638.⁷ In 1642 he married his cousin Anna, the London-born daughter of his uncle Daniel. One of the couple’s children, named Daniel as well, followed in his father’s footsteps. Other pupils of Mijtens were Julius de Geest (1638/39-1699), son of the Frisian portraitist Wybrand de Geest, Nicolaes Lissant (1639/40-after 1696), Gerard de Nijst (dates unknown), Adriaen Stalpert van der Wiele (dates unknown), Pouwels van de Velde (dates unknown), Andries Thijsz de Wit (dates unknown) and Urbanus Talibert van Yperen (c. 1630-in or after 1682). Only the first two left works that have survived.

Mijtens became one of the first members of the newly founded Confrerie Pictura artists’ society in 1656, and he was then immediately elected warden, a post which he held again in 1658-59, and another three times in 1665-69. Although repeatedly nominated as dean he only occupied that position in 1669-70. The Pictura archives also state that he was a captain in the civic guard. Mijtens had certainly been an active member of the White Banner company of the St Sebastian civic guard since 1644. He was then the ensign, and was probably made its commander in 1660. In addition to these functions, he was a church councillor from 1646 to 1654 and a deacon of the Reformed Church.

Mijtens was primarily a portraitist, but he also made some history paintings in the form of biblical scenes and pastorals, and a few genre pieces. He received commissions from the Hague elite and members of the stadholder’s court, as well as from the daughters of Stadholder Frederik Hendrik living in Leeuwarden and Germany. Mijtens’s last dated pictures are the pendants of 1668 of Cornelis Tromp and his wife Margaretha van Raephorst.⁸ It is known from the sources that even in 1670, the year he died, he was working on portraits for Henriette Catharina, the princess consort of Anhalt-Dessau. After Mijtens’s death on 19 December and burial in the family grave in The Hague’s Grote Kerk on the 24th, one of these likenesses was completed by his son Daniel, who had moved back from Italy shortly before.⁹ Mijtens was reasonably well-off. In 1669 his wealth was assessed at 20,000 guilders for tax purposes. It had not all been earned from painting; some of it came from various legacies.

Richard Harmanni, 2023

References
J. van der Does, ’s-Graven-Hage, met de voornaemste plaetsen en vermaecklijckheden, The Hague 1668, pp. 91-92; 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. 350; 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.], IV, Rotterdam 1881-82, passim; ibid., V, 1882-83, pp. 82, 84, 145-48, 153; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, II, Leipzig/Vienna 1910, pp. 211-12; Lundberg in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXV, Leipzig 1931, p. 317; Ekkart in E. Buijsen et al., Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw: Het Hoogsteder Lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag 1600-1700, exh. cat. The Hague (Haags Historisch Museum) 1998-99, pp. 206-10; A.N. Bauer, Jan Mijtens (1613/14-1670): Leben und Werk, Petersberg 2006, pp. 20-28, 129-50 (documents); Bauer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXXIX, Munich/Leipzig 2016, p. 424

Entry

When this picture was restituted to the Dutch State after the Second World War, it was regarded as a portrait of an unknown family. During the relining of the work shortly before it was given on loan to the museum in 1955, however, the names of the sitters on the back of the original canvas were revealed, as ‘Govert van Slingelandt, Christina van Beveren and their two children’,¹⁰ and then calligraphed onto the reverse of the new support. Govert van Slingelandt, Lord of the Manor of Dubbeldam, was the Pensionary of Dordrecht, and he married Christina van Beveren in that city on 24 February 1654. Although it was his permanent residence Van Slingelandt’s official function often took him to The Hague. The eldest child of the couple, Barthout, was born there ten months after their wedding on 18 December, so the boy was over two years old when this painting was made in 1657. A daughter was christened Christina in the Grote Kerk in The Hague on 15 October 1656. The mother deceased two days later and was buried in Dordrecht on the 21th;¹¹ the infant would outlive her by just a few weeks and died on 11 December.

Van Slingelandt’s wife and his 2-month-old daughter are therefore posthumous portrayed here. Jan Mijtens expressed this with the garland of flowers around little Christina’s head and by showing her blowing bubbles. Those symbols of transience are often depicted in this context.¹² De Jongh’s suggestion that the pale complexions of the mother and daughter are also allusions to their deaths was rightly contradicted by Bauer, who pointed out that Mijtens’s women and children are always lighter-skinned than his men. Moreover, Barthout, who grew to adulthood, has the same pallid look.¹³ The couple’s act of holding hands and the presence of the dog, which according to De Jongh are references to marital fidelity,¹⁴ as well as the grapes held by the boy as a sign of his parents’ chaste lifestyle, are clearly significant motifs.

Mijtens always placed his families against a landscape background, and by doing so made an original contribution to portraiture in the Dutch Republic. Oddly enough, he mainly painted them in the first half of his career, and there was a sharp decline in this type of works in the 1660s.¹⁵ He generally spread the figures across the whole scenery, in which there is often a view through to the distance. Here they are shown close together and a vista in the mountainous area behind them is lacking.

Govert van Slingelandt remarried in Dordrecht in 1661, his second wife being the widow Arnoudina van Beaumont,¹⁶ who bore him several more children. His professional life was equally prosperous. After appointments as ambassador to Sweden, Poland, Prussia and Denmark he was made secretary to the Council of State. He would have owed much of this to his great friendship with Grand Pensionary of Holland Johan de Witt, to whom he was also related.¹⁷ Barthout followed in Van Slingelandt’s footsteps by embarking on a career as an administrator and diplomat and was made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire. After his father’s death Mijtens’s portrait may have passed to him. The picture is mentioned in 1761 in the estate of Barthout’s son Hendrik, but it is not clear what happened to it after that. The family died out in the male line in 1878.¹⁸ Moes mentions the painting around 1900, but he only knew of its existence from documents.¹⁹ In 1942 it belonged to a certain J.J. Thole of Huizen, who was not demonstrably affiliated to the Van Slingelandts. The portrait was auctioned on 23 December of that year and eventually acquired for Hitler’s collection. It was recuperated after the war and became the property of the Dutch state.²⁰ It is clear from the description in the 1942 sale catalogue that it was no longer known who the sitters were, so the lining canvas that concealed their names had evidently been added before then.

Mijtens may have based his posthumous likeness of Christina van Beveren on a painting of her from 1650, when she was 17 or 18 years old. That picture, though, is known only from a drawn copy by Mattheus Verheijden,²¹ and there is no information on the artist of the original. The portraits in Mijtens’s canvas were reworked into individual drawings in the eighteenth century, by Verheijden among others, and two of those pendants are now in the Van Slingelandt family archives, which have been given to the High Council of Nobility for safekeeping. Other pairs are still in the possession of the sitters’ descendants.

Richard Harmanni, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

R. van Luttervelt, ‘Drie portretten’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 5 (1957), pp. 108-13, esp. p. 113; E. de Jongh, Portretten van echt en trouw: Huwelijk en gezin in de Nederlandse kunst van de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Halsmuseum) 1986, pp. 241-42; A.N. Bauer, Jan Mijtens (1613/14-1670): Leben und Werk, Petersberg 2006, pp. 261-62, no. A138

Collection catalogues

1976, pp. 406-07, no. A 4013

Citation

Richard Harmanni, 2023, 'Jan Mijtens, Portrait of Govert van Slingelandt (1623-1690), with his First Wife Christina van Beveren (1632-1656) and their Two Children, 1657', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4553

(accessed 13 November 2024 01:55:32).