Young Woman in a Broad-Brimmed Hat, probably an Allegory of Summer

Entry

A young woman in a white tunic stands in a wooded landscape and looks out at the viewer from beneath a broad, disc-shaped hat. In her left hand she holds up a small basket of plums. The fluttering end of the ribbon that serves as a belt suggests movement, as if she is walking or dancing. The picture was unknown before the 2009 auction at which the museum bought it. It is not signed but is so typical of Caesar van Everdingen in style and execution that there is not the slightest doubt about his authorship, and Huys Janssen certified as much with his attribution in the sale catalogue. Eventually Weber was the first to identify the work with a mention that speaks of the distinctive hat in a valuation of paintings belonging to Van Everdingen’s widow.¹² Logically, then, it was also listed in the artist’s probate inventory, probably as the cursory ‘vrouw trooni’.¹³ In the seventeenth century the word ‘tronie’ meant nothing more than ‘head’ or ‘face’, and was applied to a wide range of genres and types of image, provided a head or figure filled the picture surface or was the main motif.¹⁴ The subject of the painting was not defined in Van Everdingen’s posthumous inventory.

Weber has posited that the Rijksmuseum work is an allegory of summer. It does indeed have a decidedly sunny look, and plums are a fruit of that time of year. Weber also suggested that this canvas and an Allegory of Winter, which was also in the artist’s estate and is about the same size,¹⁵ were part of a series of the seasons, of which spring and autumn are no longer known but are hiding behind other neutral mentions of tronies in the inventory.¹⁶ As far as a date is concerned, Young Woman in a Broad-Brimmed Hat and the Allegory of Winter could be companion pieces or part of a series of the seasons. Huys Janssen assigned both pictures to the same period, namely 1645-50. They may have been made in Haarlem, while the artist was also working on his paintings for the Oranjezaal (Orange Hall) in the newly built Huis ten Bosch in The Hague. Van der Elst suspected that the present canvas is from after 1656, on the evidence of the colours of the ground layers, but does not provide sufficient justification for this.¹⁷ Both pictures depart from the standard iconography. Summer was generally represented as the goddess Ceres, and Van Everdingen used a young woman as well to personify winter, a part that was more often played by an old man.

The large size and scene-filling figures of Young Woman in a Broad-Brimmed Hat and Allegory of Winter are suitable for viewing from a distance, so could have been intended as chamber pieces. Both compositions adopt a low vantage point. In Allegory of Winter we are just about looking down on the table top, but the woman towers imperiously over us, as her sister does in this canvas. That angle leads one to suspect that both pictures were made for specific locations relatively high on a wall. Their presence in the artist’s estate makes it unlikely that they were commissions. Van Everdingen’s inventory contained several more paintings that he held on to that were definitely conceived as chamber pieces, such as a Venus and Cupid of around 1660, thus also from Van Everdingen’s Haarlem period, which was probably intended to be an overmantel.¹⁸ Two later grisailles of Venus and Adonis, dated 1665 and 1666 respectively and thus produced in Alkmaar, are decidedly decorative and were therefore also chamber pieces.¹⁹ Van Everdingen presumably continued to execute decorative paintings down the years for the different houses he lived in. However, apart from the hypothetical suites of two or four seasons it is not possible to reconstruct a decorative programme with a coherent iconography from the surviving pictures and the mention of others in the probate inventory. It is also impossible to make out from the latter whether they were incorporated within the panelling of the rooms. They are listed as separate works.

As Weber also argued, the sensual nature of this Young Woman in a Broad-Brimmed Hat makes the figure a relative of the seductive courtesans dressed as shepherdesses in paintings by the Utrecht artists Jan van Bijlert, Gerard van Honthorst and Paulus Moreelse in the 1610s and ’20s, which would also have been inspirational for Van Everdingen. In some cases, those pastoral temptresses offer fruit to the viewer or to a shepherd in a companion piece, as in a picture by Honthorst in which the woman holds up an apple, probably intended for a shepherd in a pendant that is now lost.²⁰ It is likely that Van Everdingen’s counterpart conveys the same scabrous message that Honthorst’s works does, namely that the female figure symbolically offers herself along with the plums, and must therefore be regarded as a prostitute.²¹ Van Everdingen depicted other heads of this type of sensual woman.²² Blankert attributed an equally risqué, amorous meaning to this personification of winter, but that is probably incorrect.²³

In Young Woman in a Broad-Brimmed Hat Van Everdingen provided a less explicit, historicizing and exotic interpretation of his Utrecht models. Instead of the brightly coloured, imaginary clothing based on sixteenth-century fashions painted by the Utrecht Mannerists and Caravaggisti, Van Everdingen dressed his young woman in a simple tunic of a gossamer material that suggestively accentuates her curves, just like the draperies on sculptures from classical antiquity. One decidedly peculiar touch is her hat, which in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was considered to be an integral part of gypsy attire.²⁴ However, gypsy women were more often depicted without this striking headgear than with it, so one wonders whether contemporaries would have regarded Van Everdingen’s figure as such, with all the associated negative connotations.²⁵

The decorative pattern on the basket indicates that it came from Africa or Brazil.²⁶ Viewed together, the woman’s clothing, hat and basket situate her in the past and in a distant country. In his entry for the 2009 sale catalogue Huys Janssen connected Van Everdingen’s work with that supplied by other artists for the decoration of Huis ten Bosch’s Oranjezaal in the period 1648-50. There are two larger baskets with similar decorative patterns of interwoven lozenges in Van Everdingen’s Allegory of the Birth of Frederik Hendrik for the gallery.²⁷ They also appear in Van Everdingen’s painted vault compartment with baskets of fruit.²⁸ There are two more examples in Jacob van Campen’s Triumphal Procession with Gifts from the East and West for the same room.²⁹ In this period of 1645-50 Van Campen also incorporated baskets of this kind in a frieze consisting of several chamber pieces for Huis Beekhoven, his own country house in Randenbroek near Amersfoort.³⁰ Van Everdingen’s probate inventory also lists a still life of his with baskets that was valued at 48 guilders, making it one of the more expensive works.³¹ It is plausible that they were exotic baskets similar to the one in Young Woman in a Broad-Brimmed Hat. These and other objects imported from overseas that can be seen in the Oranjezaal paintings reflect a keen curiosity in the wealth of newly founded colonies and trading posts, and the drawn impressions of them that Johan Maurits of Nassau-Siegen and the artists Albert Eckhout and Frans Post brought back from Brazil in 1644.

Eddy Schavemaker, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements