Old Woman Reading

c. 1624 - c. 1625

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 79 cm × width 70.5 cm
outer size: depth 10.5 cm (support incl. SK-L-1266)

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of three vertically grained oak planks (approx. 19.2, 28.9 and 22.4 cm) and has been thinned to approx. 0.3 cm and cradled. The top edge appears to be intact, whereas the bottom one is jagged and has chip losses of ground and paint, indicating that it was trimmed. The left and right edges are smooth and aligned with the vertical cradle bars, and have been planed down with the cradling. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1607. The panel could have been ready for use by 1618, but a date in or after 1624 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The double ground does not extend over the edges of the support. The first, cream-coloured, slightly translucent layer is followed by a thin, yellow layer which contains a small addition of tiny earth pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared reflectography.
Paint layers The paint does not extend over the edges of the support. A first lay-in was done with a brownish paint, roughly delineating the composition and indicating some dark and light areas. This initial undermodelling is still partly visible in the brown shadows in the garment and in the thin, light brown shaded parts of the face. The figure was left in reserve in the background and her right hand and forearm were reserved in the book, except for the upper part of the pink cuff. The headscarf has an off-white base with greyish paint for the shadows. A colourful, striped pattern was applied on top, as well as dark brown lines to enhance the deepest shadows. The flesh colours were worked up with contrasting, sharply defined and closely spaced, pale yellow, pink and blue brushstrokes, while dark brown paints form the deepest shadows. Bright pink brushstrokes were added for the highlighted areas of the garment and deep reddish-purple glazes for the shadows. The background was thinly applied with visible brushwork, allowing the ground to show through, while the figure was more densely executed, with thick, almost sculptural paint for the fringes of the headscarf in the bottom left corner. Infrared reflectography revealed that the scarf was broader at first, the former right-hand contour having become visible to the naked eye, and extended further down over the woman’s right shoulder and upper arm before being painted out with the pink of the sleeve.
Ige Verslype, 2025

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 23 March 1993
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 26 October 1995
infrared reflectography: I. Verslype, RMA, 23 November 2009
paint samples: I. Verslype, RMA, nos. SK-A-4702/1-2, 23 November 2009
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 23 November 2009

Condition

Fair. There are slightly discoloured retouchings along the joins and in the woman’s chin. The paint layer is abraded throughout, exposing the ground in the background, parts of the initially larger headscarf and its off-white base underneath the pink of the sleeve.

Conservation

M. Zeldenrust, 1982: complete restoration
G. Tauber, 1991: loose paint consolidated
H. Kat, 1994: crack in panel consolidated

Provenance

...; the dealer W. Barendse, The Hague, 1935;¹...; the dealer Gebr. Katz, The Hague, 1936;²...; collection Dr Marie H.G.A. Tholen (1890-1971), The Hague;³...; collection Dr Carel Hendrik ten Horn (1884-1964) and his wife, Jonkvrouw Emily F.R.M. Verheyen (1897-1984), Loon op Zand, near Tilburg;⁴ from Jonkvrouw Emily F.R.M. Verheyen, fl. 92,500, to the museum, but kept in usufruct, February 1978; transferred to the museum, 26 May 1981

Object number: SK-A-4702

The artist

Jan Lievens (Leiden 1607 - Amsterdam 1674)

According to the account published by the Leiden burgomaster and town chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers in 1641, Jan Lievens was born on 24 October 1607 in Leiden. His parents were Lieven Hendricxz, an embroiderer, and Machtelt Jansdr van Noortsant. When he was 8, his father apprenticed him to the Leiden artist Joris van Schooten, ‘from whom he learned the principles of both drawing and painting’.⁵ About two years later, in 1617 or 1618, the child prodigy was sent to study with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. Upon his return to Leiden at the age of 12 Lievens set up a studio in his father’s house. Although not documented and not mentioned by Orlers, the style of his early works suggests that Lievens probably also spent some time in Utrecht and possibly Antwerp in the early 1620s. Indeed, instead of the small-scale, multi-figure histories for which Lastman is well known, Lievens’s early output consists primarily of broadly rendered, large-scale compositions with only one or a few half-length figures, shown life-size or larger than life. Lievens’s choice of biblical, allegorical and genre subjects in the 1620s also reflects the influence of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, Gerard van Honthorst, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen, as well as that of the great Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. In addition to history and genre pieces, the young Leiden artist executed tronies, still lifes and portraits in this period, and became a talented printmaker. As his earliest signed and dated painting is from 1629,⁶ the chronology of the first decade of his output has been, and still is, open to debate.

Lievens began working closely with Rembrandt after the latter arrived back in Leiden around 1625 from a six-month apprenticeship with Lastman in Amsterdam. While the notion that the two shared a studio in Leiden is not supported by the early accounts of their careers – in fact, Orlers explicitly states that Rembrandt ‘decided to engage in and practice the art of painting entirely on his own’ after his return – Lievens and Rembrandt often treated the same subject matter, for example Samson and Delilah, the raising of Lazarus and Christ on the Cross.⁷ The fijnschilders style that the two artists developed together in the second half of the 1620s was already making it difficult for appraisers and connoisseurs to differentiate their hands during their lifetimes. Lievens’s early work was much sought after, at first by Leiden patrons, including his earliest biographer, Orlers. In 1628, Lievens and Rembrandt were visited in their respective studios by the stadholder’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens, the most powerful cultural broker in the Dutch Republic. Lievens ingratiated himself with Huygens by requesting to paint his likeness,⁸ and soon thereafter the court in The Hague began to acquire his work and offer him commissions. Some of Lievens’s pictures were also acquired by Sir Robert Kerr, representative of the English crown in The Hague, and in 1631 the exiled king of Bohemia, Frederick V, and his consort Elizabeth, a sister of King Charles I of England, commissioned Lievens to portray their son Prince Charles Louis, who was studying in Leiden at the time.⁹

In February 1632, Lievens moved to London where, according to Orlers, he painted portraits of King Charles I and his family, as well as various lords. Those works have not survived and little is known about Lievens’s output and career during his English period, which lasted until 1635. It was perhaps Anthony van Dyck’s return to England in the spring of 1635 that prompted Lievens to leave for Antwerp, where he registered as a member of the Guild of St Luke in that year and acquired citizenship in December 1640. In 1638, he married Susanna de Nole, daughter of the sculptor Andries Colijns de Nole. His father-in-law’s connections may have helped Lievens secure the commissions for two large altarpieces for the Jesuit churches in Antwerp and Brussels.¹⁰ Also in this period Lievens carried out a commission for Stadholder Frederik Hendrik and painted a monumental Magnanimity of Scipio for the council chamber of Leiden Town Hall, for which he was paid 1,500 guilders and awarded a gold medal.¹¹ Besides history pieces, Lievens executed tronies and genre scenes during his Antwerp period, and branched out in the field of painting to produce landscapes and in the graphic arts into the medium of the woodcut. He completely abandoned his early style in favour of one heavily indebted to Adriaen Brouwer, Van Dyck and Rubens.

In 1644, Lievens moved with his wife and child to Amsterdam, where he first rented a room as either living or studio space from the artist couple Jan Miense Molenaer and Judith Leyster. Susanna de Nole died shortly afterward and Lievens married Cornelia de Bray, daughter of an Amsterdam notary, in 1648. Probably in the same year, he was commissioned to paint one of the works, The Five Muses, for the cycle of allegories commemorating the life of Frederik Hendrik in the Oranjezaal (Orange Hall) in Huis ten Bosch, which was completed in 1650.¹² Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms’s eldest daughter Louise Henriette married the Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, in 1646. In 1652, Lievens was invited to contribute to the decorations of their country seat, Schloss Oranienburg near Berlin. He moved there in 1653 and executed a large portrait historié of the couple as well as mythological scenes.¹³

Lievens returned to the Dutch Republic and resided in The Hague from 1654 until March 1659 at the latest. In 1656, he was involved in setting up Confrerie Pictura, a new painters’ confraternity that broke away from the local Guild of St Luke. Lievens received several important private and public commissions in these years, not only in The Hague but also in Amsterdam. For example, he was commissioned in 1655 to execute a large overmantel of Quintus Fabius Maximus and his Son for the burgomasters’ chamber of Amsterdam Town Hall, for which he was paid 1,500 guilders.¹⁴ Although he remained a non-resident member of the Confrerie Pictura in The Hague in 1660-61, Lievens moved back to Amsterdam by March 1659, probably with an eye to securing the commission for the series of eight monumental paintings for the lunettes of the Burgerzaal (Citizens’ Hall) in the Town Hall. After Govert Flinck, who had been awarded that project, died in 1660 before being able to execute them, Lievens was given the task of painting one of the lunettes, Brinio Raised on a Shield, for which he earned 1,200 guilders.¹⁵ Another important assignment in the 1660s was for an enormous Mars (Allegory of War) for Pieter Post’s newly constructed Statenzaal, the assembly room of the States of Holland and West Friesland in the Binnenhof in The Hague.¹⁶ Lievens completed this canvas in 1664 and in the same year set off for Cleves, probably in the hope of being selected to work on the decorations of Johan Maurits of Nassau’s newly renovated Schwanenburg Castle, another architectural project based on designs by Pieter Post. Lievens’s sojourn in Cleves is veiled in mystery and it is only known that by the spring of 1666 he was back in Amsterdam, where he remained until 1669. He spent the last five years of his life constantly on the move, living alternately in The Hague, Leiden and Amsterdam. Due at least in part to non-payments by some of his patrons, which was exacerbated by the economic malaise brought on by the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74), Lievens experienced financial problems during much of his later career and died in poverty in Amsterdam in June 1674.

Throughout his career Lievens had several pupils, none of whom became significant artists in their own right. It was probably as early as his Leiden period that he instructed his younger brother Dirk (c. 1612-1650), who is known to have executed a few portraits around 1640. The otherwise obscure Hans van den Wijngaerde, who trained with Lievens in Antwerp for six years beginning in 1636, is his earliest documented pupil. According to Houbraken, who does not specify where the apprenticeship took place, Hendrik Schoock (1630-1707) from Utrecht was with Lievens after having studied with Abraham Bloemaert and before going on to Jan Davidsz de Heem. Based on Schoock’s date of birth, this would have been either in Antwerp, where De Heem was also active, or in Amsterdam shortly after Lievens moved there in 1644. In 1662, Erick van den Weerelt (1648-1715) was apprenticed by the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage to Lievens for a period of three years. The contract was extended for another three years in 1665. Lievens’s use of student help to execute some of his works is documented. According to his own testimony, his eldest son, Jan Andrea (1644-1680), painted the 1666 Geographer, an overmantel in the Gemeenlandshuis of the Rijnland polder board in Leiden, after his father’s design and with his assistance.¹⁷ He is also recorded in Lievens’s studio in Amsterdam in 1669 together with two Jewish assistants, Aron de Chavez (c. 1647-1705) and Jacob Cardoso Ribero (c. 1643-?), and a wealthy amateur, Jonas Witsen (1647-1675). Lievens’s last documented pupil was Dionys Godijn (c. 1652/57-after c. 1682), whose father apprenticed him to the master in The Hague for a period of two years beginning in 1670.

From contemporary sources it appears that Lievens was rather arrogant. Huygens detected this personality defect even in the youthful artist: ‘My only objection is his stubbornness, which derives from an excess of self-confidence’.¹⁸ Judging from a remark made by Sir Robert Kerr in a 1654 letter to his son, Lievens retained a sense of excessive self-esteem in his maturity as well: ‘[he] has so high a conceit of himself that he thinks there is none to be compared with him in all Germany, Holland, nor the rest of the seventeen provinces.’¹⁹

Jonathan Bikker, 2025

References
J.J. Orlers, Beschrijving der stad Leyden, Leiden 1641, pp. 375-77; P. Angel, Lof der Schilderkonst, Leiden 1642 – trans. M. Hoyle and annot. H. Miedema, ‘Philips Angel, Praise of Painting’, Simiolus 24 (1996), pp. 227-58, esp. pp. 245-46; 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. 186; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, pp. 212, 296-301; P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, onder zinspreuk ‘Wt jonsten versaemt’, II, Antwerp/The Hague 1876, pp. 61, 69, 139; F.J.P. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, Antwerp 1883, pp. 863-66; J.A. Worp, ‘Constantijn Huygens over de schilders van zijn tijd’, Oud Holland 9 (1891), pp. 106-36, esp. pp. 125-31; E.W. Moes, ‘Jan Lievens’, Leids Jaarboekje 4 (1907), pp. 136-64; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, I, The Hague 1915, pp. 186-227; Schneider in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXIII, Leipzig 1929, pp. 214-15; H. Schneider, Jan Lievens: Sein Leben und seine Werke, Haarlem 1932, pp. 1-10, 277-85, 289-303; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986, pp. 1764-72; J. Bruyn, ‘Review of W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986’, Oud Holland 102 (1988), pp. 322-33, esp. pp. 327-28; E. Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, IV, Brussels 1989, p. 224, no. 1034; R. de Jager, ‘Meester, leerjongen, leertijd: Een analyse van zeventiende-eeuwse Noord-Nederlandse leerlingcontracten van kunstschilders, goud- en zilversmeden’, Oud Holland 104 (1990), pp. 69-111, esp. pp. 74, 98-99, doc. nos. 11, 12, 15, p. 102, doc. no. 31; P.J.M. de Baar and I.W.L. Moerman, ‘Rembrandt van Rijn en Jan Lievens, inwoners van Leiden’, in C. Vogelaar et al., Rembrandt & Lievens in Leiden: ‘Een jong en edel schildersduo’/Rembrandt & Lievens in Leiden: ‘A Pair of Young and Noble Painters’, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) 1991-92, pp. 24-38; E. Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, V, Brussels 1991, pp. 100-01; Domela Nieuwenhuis in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XIX, New York 1996, pp. 347-50; J.G.C.A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, pp. 352-53; A.K. Wheelock Jr, ‘Jan Lievens: Bringing New Light to an Old Master’, in A.K. Wheelock Jr et al., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Milwaukee (Milwaukee Art Museum)/Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2008-09, pp. 1-27

Entry

This unsigned and undated Old Woman Reading was already recognized as an early work by Jan Lievens when it was first published in 1936,²⁰ and the attribution has rightly never been called into question. In his early years in Leiden, Lievens produced several monumental half-length, single-figure compositions derived from the example of the Utrecht Caravaggisti. Although no such paintings by this group of artists with the present subject, an elderly woman reading, have survived, Gerard van Honthorst did depict individual old women singing or holding various objects, such as coins, an empty purse or a candle, and these works may have served Lievens as a point of departure.²¹ Another possible model may have been Abraham Bloemaert’s Old Woman with a Rosary Praying.²² Like the aged women by Honthorst and Bloemaert, Lievens’s one wears a simple, unadorned overgarment. While it has been claimed that its striking lilac colour betrays the influence of Lievens’s documented teacher, Pieter Lastman,²³ a more likely source of inspiration was another Dutch Caravaggio follower, Hendrick ter Brugghen, who used it in compositions with large-scale figures. The striped headscarf worn by Lievens’s model may have been borrowed from Honthorst’s depictions of elderly women.

Lievens’s broad handling of paint in the present work is unlike that of his Utrecht models, but nevertheless typical of his early production. The striated highlights forming the wrinkles of the woman’s face and right hand, in particular, are indicative of Lievens’s manner in this period. There are also passages in which the paint functions mimetically. The ridges of the headscarf and the edges of the pages of the large book have been created with considerable impasto, rendering them three-dimensional. The impasto is at its thickest, however, at the bottom left in the scarf’s fringe. It is especially here that the paint imitates the structure of the object it describes. Although it has been argued that the source for Lievens’s extensive application of paint were oil sketches by Anthony van Dyck and Jacques Jordaens, a comparable mimetic use of paint is not to be found in the oeuvre of those Flemish masters.

In contrast to Rembrandt’s early work, very few pictures by Lievens from his initial period in Leiden bear a date. The first example to be found is from 1629,²⁴ which means there is approximately a decade of production from the time Lievens finished his apprenticeship with Lastman around 1619 that can be reconstructed for the most part on stylistic grounds alone. Dendrochronology of Old Woman Reading indicated that it was probably executed in or after 1624,²⁵ and a dating to that year or 1625 seems warranted. Unlike Lievens’s series of Evangelists in Bamberg, for example,²⁶ the figure is placed very close to the picture plane and fills the entire space. Furthermore, Lievens’s application of paint appears to become relatively finer as the decade progresses, and the intense pastel colouring in the present composition and other, presumably early ones, such as A Man Singing in Kingston,²⁷ gives way to a more muted palette in which earth tones feature prominently. Also when compared to the series of Evangelists, the rendering of the books here is far less accomplished. The many changes Lievens made during the painting process – the headscarf, for example, was reduced in size,²⁸ and the woman’s left hand was added at a late stage – may also be an indication that this is an early work. Finally, the shadow cast by the book on the wall on the right-hand side of the composition is inconsistent with the lighting, which comes from the left.

The model used for this painting, with her thin, pinched lips and small, hooked nose, presumably reappears in several other, later works by Lievens, Rembrandt and their circle. The old woman wearing a striped headscarf, as in this Lievens, first appears in Rembrandt’s oeuvre in his 1626 Musical Company and Tobit and Anna with the Kid.²⁹ Since the eighteenth century the figure has been identified as Rembrandt’s mother, Neeltgen Willemsdr van Zuytbroeck.³⁰ While seventeenth-century sources do not tell us whether Lievens ever depicted her, the Leiden town chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers reported that ‘in the year 1621, at the age of 14, he painted his [own] mother’s portrait so well and skilfully that everyone marvelled at it’.³¹ The likeness referred to has never been identified, but it is certain that Lievens’s mother, Machtelt Jansdr van Noortsant, could not have been the model for the present work, as she died in childbirth in March 1622.³²

The striped headscarf was considered a Middle Eastern costume element, indicating that the woman was probably meant to represent a biblical or classical figure.³³ One possibility is that she is the prophetess Anna, an 84-year-old widow who ‘departed not from the temple, but served God with fastings and prayers night and day’ and recognized the infant Jesus as the Messiah (Luke 2:36-38).³⁴ In Rembrandt’s Presentation in the Temple from around 1627-28 in Hamburg she wears a scarf similar to the one here, and the model Rembrandt used is apparently the same elderly woman.³⁵ His 1631 Old Woman Reading in the Rijksmuseum³⁶ was probably inspired by an engraving of the prophetess Anna designed by Maerten de Vos around 1590-95.³⁷ Lievens’s composition, however, does not share the profile view of the figure in that print, nor in Rembrandt’s painting of 1631, which it also predates by more than half a decade.

Further possibilities should therefore be entertained. The engraving of Anna was conceived by Maerten de Vos as part of a series of 15 illustrious women of the New Testament (Icones illustrium feminarum novi testamenti).³⁸ One of the other prints shows the aged Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, wearing a headscarf and reading a book in a pose that comes close to that of the present old woman.³⁹ A third option is that Lievens’s figure is a sibyl, one of the prophetesses resident at shrines or temples throughout the classical world. The most famous examples of their depiction in art are the five Michelangelo painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Lievens, who never travelled to Italy, could have known these from reproductive engravings, but sibyls were also the subject of a number of print series executed by sixteenth-century artists north of the Alps, such as the one made by Philips Galle after designs by Anthonie Blocklandt. The Cumaean Sibyl was rendered by Blocklandt and others as an elderly female figure,⁴⁰ because of Ovid’s tale of how she asked Apollo to grant her as many years as there were grains in a handful of dust, neglecting also to request eternal youth.⁴¹ The same sibyl appears in Virgil’s fourth Eclogue, in which she foretells the coming of a saviour, whom Christians identified as Jesus.⁴² A 1632 painting of an old woman reading by Paulus Lesire, a follower of Rembrandt, is an unequivocal depiction of the Cumaean Sibyl, as a label attached to her turban-like headdress is inscribed with the word ‘CUMA’ and the text in the book she is holding is inscribed with lines 13-14 of Virgil’s Eclogue.⁴³ Although it cannot be determined precisely which biblical or classical figure is shown here, the young Lievens can be credited with introducing the theme of an old woman reading into Dutch painting.⁴⁴

Jonathan Bikker, 2025

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

J.G. van Gelder, Rembrandt’s vroegste ontwikkeling, Amsterdam 1953, pp. 13-14; H. Gerson, ‘Twee vroege studies van Jan Lievens’, Mededelingen van het Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie 9 (1954), pp. 179-80, esp. p. 180; K. Bauch, ‘Zum Werk des Jan Lievens, II’, Pantheon 25 (1967), pp. 259-69, esp. pp. 259-61; H. Schneider and R.E.O. Ekkart, Jan Lievens: Sein Leben und seine Werke, Amsterdam 1973, p. 348, no. S 358; J. Bruyn et al., A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, I, The Hague/Boston/London 1982, p. 458; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986, p. 1861, no. 1222; H. Gutbrod, Lievens und Rembrandt: Studien zum Verhältnis ihrer Kunst, Frankfurt 1996, pp. 95-96, 314; Vogelaar in C. Vogelaar and G. Korevaar (eds.), Rembrandts moeder: Mythe en werkelijkheid, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) 2005-06, pp. 86-88, no. 2; C. Vogelaar, ‘“Ars longa, vita brevis”: Het boek in de Leidse schilderkunst van de Gouden Eeuw’, in A. Bouwman et al., Stad van boeken: Handschrift en druk in Leiden 1260-2000, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) 2008, pp. 269-87, esp. p. 272; B. Schnackenburg, Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the Young Rembrandt: With a Catalogue Raisonné of his Early Leiden Works 1623-1632, Petersberg 2016, pp. 52, 56, 58, 200, no. 31

Collection catalogues

1992, p. 63, no. A 4702

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2025, 'Jan Lievens, Old Woman Reading, c. 1624 - c. 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200109433

(accessed 11 December 2025 00:48:11).