Portrait of Jacoba of Bavaria (1401-36), Countess of Holland and Zeeland

Entry

This portrait of Jacoba of Bavaria and its pendant showing her fourth husband Frank van Borselen, Lord of Sint Maartensdijk (SK-A-499), once hung at Kasteel Nieuw Teylingen, the couple’s former residence.⁴ Both figures are shown standing at half-length before a wooden ledge. Their respective coats of arms hang from ornamental mascarons in the background, while gilded inscriptions at the top of each panel identify them by name. Jacoba wears a red pleated houppelande with a lining of brown fur and a high standing collar and slit sleeves that open to reveal black undersleeves. She wears a red and gold hairnet over her hair, which is done up in two horns and covered at the back of her head by a black veil. Her hands rest at her waist below a gold chain belt. Frank wears a black doublet and a red chaperon, which is scalloped at the edges and embellished with a bejewelled pin.⁵ Both he and his wife wear the collar of St Antony around their necks, the insignia of the order founded by Jacoba’s grandfather, Albrecht of Bavaria, in 1382.⁶

Jacoba, born the Duchess of Bavaria on 25 July 1401, became the Countess of Holland, Zeeland, Friesland, and Hainaut upon her father Willem VI’s death in 1417. She had already endured three ill-fated marriages and a series of political and family conflicts when, in the summer of 1432, she married Frank van Borselen, Lord of Sint Maartensdijk, Scherpenisse and Zuylen, and Stadholder of Holland. The ceremony was performed in secret, as the Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good, had forbidden Jacoba to remarry without his consent. When Philip learned of the marriage, he imprisoned Frank and forced Jacoba to relinquish her counties immediately in exchange for his release. She complied in 1433, accepting the diminished title, ‘Duchess of Bavaria and of Holland, Countess of Oostervant’ (‘hertogin in Beieren, van Holland, gravin van Oostervant’). Frank likewise became the Count of Oostervant upon the couple’s second, public marriage in 1434. Jacoba died just two years later; Frank lived on until 1470 and never remarried.⁷

A notable feature of these two portraits is Jacoba’s placement to the right of her husband, the position deemed superior by long-standing courtly and heraldic custom.⁸ In other surviving double portraits of the couple, she is also situated to his right.⁹ Although it is the husband who generally assumes this position of honour, Jacoba’s far more significant political status here overrides this tradition and relegates Frank to the sinister side. Jacoba’s first three husbands fully shared in her titles, but Frank married Jacoba after Philip had laid claim to her inheritance and thus did not benefit from this elevation in rank. The distinction is evident in an illumination from the late 15th-century chronicle of Johan Huyssen van Kattendijke that presents the coats of arms of Jacoba and her four husbands, all of whom are referred to as ‘dukes’ except for Frank, who is identified only as a ‘lord’.¹⁰

The Rijksmuseum pendants have been identified as 16th-century copies after an early 15th-century model. Not only is the couple’s attire characteristic of this earlier period, but Jacoba’s posture and costume also correspond to three other portraits of her long thought to record a lost composition by Jan van Eyck.¹¹ With the more recent discovery of a painting recorded in Kasteel Heverlee’s inventory inscribed, in translation, ‘Done on 3 August 1432 by Lambert van Eyck. When this portrait was made, our Lady Jacoba was 31 years old’, the existence of an Eyckian portrait of the duchess, painted not by Jan but by his brother, was confirmed.¹²o d[omi]ni. 1432. G. IIJ augusti a Lamberto de Eyck… Als dit gemaect was onder Vrau Jacob hadde XXXJ jaer’; see Steppe 1983, pp. 63-86, esp. p. 64. In this inscription and in the Rijksmuseum portrait, the countess is referred to as ‘Lady Jacoba’, a title which she is frequently given in contemporary documents; Steppe 1983, p. 69.] The portrait by Lambert, dated to the summer of 1432, was made precisely at the time of Jacoba’s secret marriage to Frank. It is likely, given the surviving copies, that Lambert painted a pendant portrait of him as well. Karel van Mander also refers to a well-executed but rather ‘old-fashioned’ pair of portraits of Jacoba and Frank by Jan Mostaert, which must have been copied after an earlier original, perhaps after Lambert’s work.¹³ Other extant portraits of Frank also closely resemble the one in the Rijksmuseum.¹⁴

Lambert van Eyck’s unknown work of 1432 thus provides the most likely model for the Rijksmuseum portrait of Jacoba. Whether Lambert also painted an accompanying likeness of Frank on the occasion of their clandestine marriage is less certain. The double portrait may instead have been a later construction.¹⁵ In either case, the paintings in the Rijksmuseum remain the best surviving example of what clearly became the couple’s official portraits.¹⁶
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