The Idolatry of King Solomon (I Kings 11:4-8)

c. 1636 - c. 1640

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 62 cm × width 48.5 cm

Inscriptions

signature, bottom centre: W.D.P.

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of two vertically grained oak planks (approx. 27.6 and 20.9 cm), approx. 1.2 cm thick. The top and right edges have been trimmed. The reverse is bevelled at the bottom and on the right, and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1623. The panel could have been ready for use by 1632, but a date in or after 1642 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends over the edges of the support at the bottom and on the left, but not over the top and right edges. The first layer is cream-coloured and slightly translucent. The second ground consists of a light brown matrix containing some white pigment with a small addition of earth pigments.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography. Some straight, horizontal incisions in the ground, presumably made with a mechanical tool, such as a ruler, are partly visible through the paint layers, and indicate the architectural structure in the background and the steps of the stairs. The latter were incised somewhat higher up than in the final painting.
Paint layers The paint extends over the edges of the support at the bottom and on the left, but not over the top and right edges. The composition was laid out in a dark brown, using the ground as a mid-tone. This sketch has remained partly visible, in the figure and bundles of wood at lower left for instance. The architecture in the background was subsequently blocked in with a light grey, leaving most of the figures in reserve. The two women executed in subdued colours behind the kneeling king in the green mantle were then placed on top, and a darker grey was used to model the architecture further, thereby also painting out another woman to the right of the king. The figures were worked up with smooth, blended transitions between mid-tones and shadows. Highlights were applied with many delicate, repetitive lines, enhancing the modelling and adding detail. This is particularly noticeable in the faces and clothing of the figures, especially in the rich embroidery of the king’s robe. Some scratches were made in the still-wet paint to render the flames from the incense in the goblet held by the red-robed woman in front of the altar. Infrared photography revealed a square reserve on the steps in the right corner, where a carpet may have been planned. Some elements were painted over the background, such as the goblet held by the woman kneeling in front of the altar. The contour of the purple robe of the figure to the left of the priest was adjusted to have it slightly extend over the latter’s white garment.
Ige Verslype, 2023

Scientific examination and reports

X-radiography: RMA, no. De Wild 110, March 1930
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 12 March 2003
infrared photography: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 January 2010
paint samples: I. Verslype, RMA, nos. SK-A-757/1-2, 12 January 2010
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 January 2010
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 20 September 2012

Condition

Fair. There is some slightly raised but stable paint in the figures in the lower right corner. The king’s robe and the upper part of the chair beside him display alligator cracking.

Conservation

W. Hesterman, 1980: consolidation of loose paint; complete restoration

Provenance

…; ? sale, Johanna Carolina Tollens (1783-1866, Amsterdam), widow of Hercules Victorianus Franciscus Usellino (1786-1854, Amsterdam), Amsterdam (C.F. Roos et al.), 30 January 1866 sqq., no. 92 (‘W. de Poorter Ecole de Rembrandt. Le roi Salomon est séduit par ses femmes et vient rendre hommage aux dieux païens. Le roi, agenouillé au pied d’un autel, est entouré de ses femmes; les prêtres, en grand sacerdoce, brûlent l’encens. Signé W. de P. h. 62, l. 48 c. Bois.’), fl. 800, to Roos;…; collection Daniel Franken Dzn (1838-1898), Amsterdam and Le Vésinet, 1872;¹ from whom acquired by Martin Coster (1819-1880), Amsterdam and Paris, 1872;² his sale, Paris (C. Pillet), 10 May 1880, no. 122, fl. 225, to the museum³

Object number: SK-A-757

The artist

Willem de Poorter (? Haarlem c. 1607/08 - ? Haarlem in or after 1648)

Willem de Poorter was reported to be 30 years old in a notarized document dated 12 June 1638, so he was probably born in 1607 or 1608, and most likely in Haarlem since his father, Pieter de Poorter, an immigrant from Moorsele in Flanders, had settled there by 1601. The artist himself is first recorded in the city in 1630. Although two of his paintings were sold at an auction in Haarlem in 1631, and his earliest extant picture is dated 1633,⁴ it was only in 1634 that he was listed as a master in the local Guild of St Luke. Pieter Casteleyn (1618-1676) was registered as his pupil the following year. Two others, Pieter Abrams Poorter (dates unknown) – probably a relative – and Claes Coenraets (dates unknown), began their apprenticeships with him in 1643.

De Poorter’s oeuvre consists of small history pieces and still lifes with armour. It is not known with whom he trained, but the principal influences on his histories were Pieter Lastman and Rembrandt. A drawing after the latter’s 1636 Susanna and the Elders bears De Poorter’s signature.⁵ A drawn copy after Rembrandt’s 1630 Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem and a painted one of his 1631 Simeon in the Temple have also been convincingly attributed to him.⁶ As both those pictures probably date from the time when Rembrandt was still living in Leiden, and the influence of other of his early works is discernible in De Poorter’s oeuvre, the Haarlem artist may well have received instruction from him there. This hypothesis also explains why his still lifes were executed in the fijnschilder manner of Rembrandt’s Leiden pupil Gerrit Dou. The aforementioned drawing after Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders indicates that De Poorter, whose presence in Amsterdam is recorded on at least one occasion in 1637, remained in contact with Rembrandt after the latter had moved there.

It is usually stated in the literature that De Poorter became sheriff of Wijk, a town near Heusden in the province of North Brabant, in 1642. This notion is based on notarized documents from Amsterdam that were discovered by Bredius, but is nevertheless mistaken. The patronymic of the Willem de Poorter mentioned in those records and elsewhere was not Pietersz, as with the present artist. The person referred to is Willem Willemsz de Poorter, son of Willem Dircksz de Poorter (1543-before 1607), a burgomaster of Wijk.⁷

The place and year of De Poorter’s death are not known. His last dated painting is from 1647.⁸ No documentary trace of him is found after 7 April 1648, when he was living in Haarlem.

Jonathan Bikker, 2023

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, III, Amsterdam 1721, p. 61; A. van der Willigen, Geschiedkundige aanteekeningen over Haarlemsche schilders en andere beoefenaren van de beeldende kunsten, voorafgegaan door eene korte geschiedenis van het schilders- of St. Lucas Gild aldaar, Haarlem 1866, p. 178; Juynboll in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXVII, Leipzig 1933, pp. 258-59; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lucasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1798, I, Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, p. 137; ibid., II, 1980, pp. 420, 433, 535, 598, 1040; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, IV, Landau/Pfalz 1989, pp. 2385-89; Broos in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XXV, New York 1996, pp. 230-31; J.G.C.A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, p. 369; A.E. Waiboer, ‘Willem de Poorter: Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt Pupil’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 5 (2013), no. 2 (https://jhna.org/articles/willem-de-poorter-rembrandt-not-rembrandt-pupil/); Wegener in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XCVI, Munich/Leipzig 2017, pp. 325-26

Entry

According to the Bible, ‘King Solomon loved many strange women, together with the daughter of Pharaoh, women of the Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Zidonians, and Hittites’ (I Kings 11:1). All told, he had seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines, and when he was old they persuaded him to make sacrifices to their gods. This displeased the Lord God of Israel, who ‘said unto Solomon, Forasmuch as this is done of thee, and thou hast not kept my covenant and my statutes, which I have commanded thee, I will surely rend the kingdom from thee, and will give it to thy servant’ (I Kings 11:11). Willem de Poorter depicted Solomon holding a censer while he kneels to the right of centre in front of an altar at which a priest is performing the offering. A few of his numerous women are present, including two black females, probably included to emphasize the exotic nature of the harem. The object of their worship is a statue of Venus and Amor, which was modelled on the Venus caelestis in the Vatican.

Occurring most often in series of biblical and classical women who caused the downfall of their men, the idolatry of King Solomon was a popular theme in sixteenth-century prints.⁹ The Rijksmuseum panel is one of a number of pictures of the subject executed in the first half of the seventeenth century in Haarlem, where it was a staple in the repertoires of such history painters as Jacob de Wet, Hendrick Pot, Salomon de Bray and De Poorter himself.¹⁰ Despite its vertical format, the diagonal composition of this scene with figures kneeling before a person of authority standing on a raised platform can definitely be described as a variant used by De Poorter in his 1636 Sts Paul and Barnabas at Lystra.¹¹ It was in turn inspired by Pieter Lastman, notably his Coriolanus and the Roman Women of 1625,¹² and both his versions of Sts Paul and Barnabas at Lystra from 1614 and 1617.¹³ From the latter painting, in particular, De Poorter appears to have derived a number of the figures for his own 1636 Sts Paul and Barnabas and this Idolatry of King Solomon as well, such as the priest robed in white and wearing a wreath on his head, and the bending man holding a bundle of wood, shown from behind rather than frontally.¹⁴ The men with torches in the present panel – not included in De Poorter’s picture of 1636 – may also have been borrowed from the 1617 Sts Paul and Barnabas by Lastman. The latter’s oeuvre would, furthermore, have been the model for the pastel hues in the two paintings by De Poorter.

In addition, Rembrandt’s work, such as the 1631 Simeon in the Temple,¹⁵ would have provided the example for highlighting the altars and its surrounding figures while leaving the left foreground and the background in shadow. The poses and costumes, in particular the headscarves, of the kneeling woman seen from behind in De Poorter’s Sts Paul and Barnabas and The Idolatry of King Solomon were presumably adopted from Rembrandt’s 1630 etching of Simeon in the Temple,¹⁶ whereas the idea of showing the bare heel of her left foot would have come from Lastman’s pictures. The vertical layout of the Rijksmuseum’s Idolatry was probably inspired by either Rembrandt’s painting or print of Simeon in the Temple.

De Poorter’s depiction of a statue of Venus being worshipped departs from most of the sixteenth-century prints of Solomon’s idolatry, in which the heathen god is male. In the related biblical passage, a number of pagan deities are mentioned by name including Ashtoreth (Astarte), the principal female divinity of the Zidonians (I Kings 11:5). The artist’s choice of Venus was based on the identification of this Zidonian goddess with the Roman goddess of love by a number of classical writers, who are extensively paraphrased in a chapter devoted to Ashtoreth in an anonymous book titled Heydensche afgoden, beelden, tempels en offeranden; met de vremde ceremonien naer elcks landts wijse (Pagan idols, statues, temples and sacrifices; with the alien ceremonies corresponding to each country’s custom) which was published in Haarlem in 1646. For example, the author cites Cicero (De natura deorum, bk III, 23), without mention of his source, in the first line of his chapter on Astrot (Ashtoreth), when he describes her as ‘then the last of the four Venuses’.¹⁷ However, the notion advanced by Bleyerveld that De Poorter’s Idolatry of King Solomon and depictions of the subject by other Haarlem artists probably postdate the publication of this book cannot be maintained.¹⁸ Given the stylistic similarities to his 1636 Sts Paul and Barnabas, De Poorter’s Idolatry was probably made around the same year.¹⁹ Moreover, there is at least one treatment of the theme that is not by a Haarlem painter but by the Amsterdam-based Salomon Koninck, which includes a sculpture of Venus and Amor and predates the Heydensche afgoden by two years.²⁰ It seems safer to conclude that De Poorter knew of the ancient identification of Ashtoreth with Venus and passed this information on to the anonymous author of the Heydensche afgoden, who according to its introduction was one of his former pupils.²¹ De Poorter may also have known Philips Galle’s 1565 engraving of Solomon’s idolatry, which in addition to the main statue of a male heathen god shows another one of the Venus pudica type in the background.²²

De Poorter’s use of a Venus and Amor and the bared breasts of the woman standing next to Solomon obviously emphasize the role lust played in the king’s downfall. The author of the Heydensche afgoden presented the story not only as a warning to the contemporary reader against the dangerous effects of desire, but also of insobriety: ‘Thus one sees that although Solomon had acquired supreme wisdom from God Almighty it had abandoned him because of his voluptuousnesses, which one still sees and perceives daily by many who become just like beasts without sense or reason through excessive drunkenness and whoring, forgetting all religion and civil conduct, changing into filthy pigs through Circe’s potion.’²³

Technical examination has revealed that the panel has been cut down.²⁴ Comparison with two contemporary copies after this picture that are on the same scale indicates that about 8 centimetres have been removed from the top and 7.5 centimetres from the right side.²⁵ A painting of the idolatry of King Solomon by De Poorter, with virtually the same dimensions as the Rijksmuseum work in its present state, was in the 1866 sale of Johanna Carolina Tollens.²⁶

Jonathan Bikker, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, IV, Landau/Pfalz 1989, pp. 2386, 2408, no. 1610, with earlier literature; J. van Gent, ‘De tijd van de koningen en de profeten’, in C. Tümpel et al., Het Oude Testament in de schilderkunst van de Gouden Eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Joods Historisch Museum) 1991-92, pp. 88-105, esp. p. 96; Van Gent in ibid., p. 248, no. 30; Y. Bleyerveld, Hoe bedriechlijck dat die vrouwen zijn: Vrouwenlisten in de beeldende kunst in de Nederlanden circa 1350-1650, Leiden 2000, p. 241; A.E. Waiboer, ‘Lastmans Opferdarstellungen und ihre weit reichende Wirkung’, in M. Sitt (ed.), Pieter Lastman: In Rembrandts Schatten?, exh. cat. Hamburg (Kunsthalle) 2006, pp. 40-49, esp. p. 47

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 134, no. 1124; 1903, p. 211, no. 1898; 1934, p. 226, no. 1898; 1960, p. 246, no. 1898; 1976, p. 451, no. A 757

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2023, 'Willem de Poorter, The Idolatry of King Solomon (I Kings 11:4-8), c. 1636 - c. 1640', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5077

(accessed 23 November 2024 05:40:22).