Portrait of an Officer

Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn (? Culemborg c. 1572 - The Hague 1657)

Although there are no archival records to support such a supposition, it is believed that Jan Anthonisz van Ravesteyn was the son of a glass-painter, Anthonis van Ravesteyn, who is documented in Culemborg in 1593 and in The Hague in 1602. Van Ravesteyn’s date of birth is also uncertain, but it was probably around 1572. His name appears in two notarized documents from October 1597 in Delft, which has led to the belief that he was apprenticed to Van Mierevelt. However, Van Ravesteyn’s earliest known work, Portrait of Hugo de Groot at the Age of 16 of 1599,² differs from Van Mierevelt’s early oeuvre, which, it has to be admitted does not include paintings from before 1600. In 1598 Van Ravesteyn joined the painters’ guild in The Hague, where he remained the rest of his life, marrying Anna Arentsdr van Barendrecht from Dordrecht in 1604. The wedding took place at the town hall, not in the Reformed Church, and from other, later documents it is known that the artist was a Catholic. A Van Ravesteyn was dean of the painters’ guild in The Hague in 1617, but whether this was Jan van Ravesteyn or his brother Anthonie, who was also a painter, is not known. In 1631, 1634 and 1637 he was nominated as warden of the guild, but not elected. He may perhaps have served in some capacity before 1631, but as the records of the guild’s administrators are spotty before that year, this cannot be ascertained.

Van Ravesteyn was the foremost portraitist in The Hague in the first half of the 17th century. His clientele consisted primarily of highly placed government officials and the patrician circles of The Hague and Dordrecht, the latter probably because of his wife’s ties to that town. In addition to portraits of individual burghers, Van Ravesteyn painted five civic guard pieces, some of which were quite innovative. Although there are hundreds of extant portraits by Van Ravesteyn and his workshop dating to after 1611, the number before that date is extremely small, in spite of the fact that his work was already being praised by Van Mander in 1604. His breakthrough – at least as far as commissions are concerned – seems to have come with the ambitious series of officers’ portraits begun probably for Prince Maurits in 1611.³ As his last signed and dated works are from 1641, Van Ravesteyn seems to have laid down his paintbrushes in that year. He was, however, one of the first artists invited to join the newly established Confrerie Pictura in 1656. The guild books list the names of his numerous pupils, the only outstanding one being Adriaen Hanneman (c. 1604-71), who would later become his son-in-law.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 300r; Van Gool I, 1750, pp. 15-22; Terwesten 1770, p. 9; Obreen III, 1880-81, pp. 261, 283, 285, IV, 1881-82, pp. I, 4-7, 10, 30, 59, V, 1882-83, pp. 68, 70, 72; Bredius/Moes 1892; Ekkart in The Hague 1998, pp. 230-37