Christ Crowned with Thorns (Matthew 27:27-31)

c. 1622

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 192.4 cm × width 221.5 cm
support: depth 7.5 cm (support incl. frame)
outer size: weight 55 kg

Technical notes

The plain-weave canvas support has been lined. The painting has been reduced in size by a couple of centimetres on all four sides. Prior to the present lining, the edges of the painting had been folded and the canvas stretched smaller by approximately 6 cm in both directions. The double ground consists of an orange-red lower layer followed by a grey layer. A brown imprimatura was then applied throughout, except under the kneeling figure in red on the left. The grey ground layer was reserved only for this figure’s red shirt. Traces of red and white painted underdrawing can be found, one clearly visible as a pentimento for the white cloth. A pentimento under Christ’s right arm shows that his torso was originally broader. Another one indicates that Christ’s left leg was first conceived bent back and further to the right. A third shows that the right arm of the standing man in orange may have been further to the left. The handling is quite broad with deep glazing in the shadows of the figures. Abrasion has resulted in a more open and broader appearance of the brushwork.

Scientific examination and reports

X-radiography: RMA, nos. GF-4 (detail), GF-5 (detail), 5 March 1992
paint samples: K. Groen / L. Sozzani, RMA, 2002
technical report: L. Sozzani, RMA, 16 May 2002

Condition

Poor. The painting is severely abraded, especially in the lower right area between the figure of Christ and the boy blowing on a horn.

Conservation

Fa. Cuypers & Co, 1896: restored
L. Kuiper, 1987 - 1988: complete restoration; canvas lined
L. Sozzani, 1993 - 2006: complete restoration

Provenance

? Commissioned by or for the church ‘Het Stadhuis van Hoorn’, later the Dominicuskerk, Amsterdam;¹ ? First mentioned in the Dominicuskerk, 1765;² on loan to the museum from the Dominicuskerk, 1887-99 (SK-C-479);³ purchased from the Dominicuskerk by the museum, with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt and the Rijksmuseum-Stichting, 1986

Object number: SK-A-4837

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt, the Stichting Jubileumfonds Rijksmuseum and the Rijksmuseum-Stichting

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 1616,⁴ 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 1617-18.⁵ 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.⁶ A commission from the British ambassador in The Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, for Lord Arundel came as early as 1620⁷ and eventually led to the invitation from Charles I to work on Banqueting House in Whitehall in 1628.⁸ 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.⁹ 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 only scholar to doubt the attribution of the present painting to Honthorst has been Braun.¹⁰ While others have viewed it as a work from the artist’s Italian period,¹¹ Judson has made a good case for dating it to the first years of his return to Utrecht, specifically c. 1622.¹² The composition of seven full-length figures is more ambitious than the concentrated treatments of the theme convincingly dated to Honthorst’s Italian period.¹³ The main diagonal formed by the silhouetted repoussoir figure, the figure of Christ, and the armoured soldier on the right compares best with the composition of the Death of Seneca, which was probably also executed in the 1620s.¹⁴ It was predominantly in the 1620s that Honthorst used covered artificial light sources, such as the torch in the present painting, one notable exception being the Denial of St Peter dated by Judson to around 1618.¹⁵ The intensity of the illumination is closest to that in the 1622 Dentist.¹⁶ The colour scheme, especially the use of mauve and blue, is also similar in these two works, while the Italian versions of The Crowning with Thorns are tonally more subdued. As Judson has pointed out, the boy dressed in blue and holding the torch in the Amsterdam painting also appears with a similarly illuminated face in the Dentist.¹⁷ Honthorst apparently used exactly the same figure – and again as the bearer of artificial illumination – for his Death of Seneca. The standing soldier on the right is compared by Judson to the 1623 Merry Violinist with Wineglass in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-180), and to the figure in a painting (probably a fragment) now in the Milwaukee Art Center,¹⁸ although it should be pointed out that a very similar figure, with a similar gorget and plumed helmet, already appears in the above-mentioned Denial of St Peter of c. 1618. The likelihood that the Rijksmuseum work was painted on commission for ‘Het Stadhuis van Hoorn’, a clandestine church in Amsterdam probably founded in the 1620s,¹⁹ also provides an argument in support of Judson’s dating.

Although most probably executed in Utrecht, two depictions of Christ Crowned with Thorns in Rome were undoubtedly of great importance for Honthorst’s composition, that of Francesco da Ponte Bassano formerly in the Palazzo Barberini,²⁰ and Rubens’s painting for Santa Croce in Gerusalemme.²¹ The boy holding a torch might have been derived from Bassano’s painting, and the tightly drawn shroud from Rubens’s work, while either or both paintings could have been the inspiration for the diagonal composition and kneeling foreground figure on the left.

In most depictions of the Crowning with Thorns, Christ is shown bent over from the pain and humiliation of his ordeal. Uniquely, Honthorst’s Christ looks upward, perhaps towards God, for support. The standing soldier on the far left also looks upward, his laughter contrasting with Christ’s steadfast disposition. Both Matthias Stom and Jan Janssens painted scenes closely based on Honthorst’s painting.²² Neither, however, adopted the upward glances of Honthorst’s Christ and soldier.

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. 134.

Literature

Judson/Ekkart 1999, pp. 85-86, no. 60, with earlier literature

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 80, no. 676; 1992, p. 57, no. A 4837; 2007, no. 134

Citation

J. Bikker, 2007, 'Gerard van Honthorst, Christ Crowned with Thorns (Matthew 27:27-31), c. 1622', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8757

(accessed 22 November 2024 16:05:08).