Portrait of a Family

Entry

This family portrait by Jacob van der Merck was one of two paintings that Adriaan Justus Enschedé, city archivist of Haarlem, presented to the forerunner of the Rijksmuseum in December 1874.⁶ The Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst was still being governed at the time by the Commission of State Advisers for Monuments of History and Art, of which Enschedé had become a member shortly before. The donation was discussed at a committee meeting on 14 January 1875,⁷ and according to the minutes Enschedé had discovered both works in Amsterdam. The portrait by Van der Merck ‘lay flat on the floor to prevent peat getting into the cracks in the floor’, and the other painting, which was a copy after Abraham Liedts’s likeness of Admiral Pieter Florisz,⁸ was wrapped around the slabs of peat. Unfortunately, there is no mention of the location, so the earlier provenance of the pictures cannot be traced.⁹ Van der Merck’s canvas was thus in a very battered condition when it entered the Nederlandsch Museum and it was then probably restored. Nothing was said about its state when it was transferred from The Hague to Amsterdam in 1885.¹⁰ However, there is a note in the Rijksmuseum’s inventory book that it was partly overpainted. Today the man’s head has disappeared completely. It was very probably decided to rectify the previous intervention but that was done too radically.¹¹

Despite its sorry condition, the work does give a reasonable idea of Van der Merck’s qualities as a portraitist. The balustrade and other architectural details suggest that the family is on the terrace of a building resembling a pavilion. The married couple are seated, with a younger woman, probably a daughter, standing on the right. It was not uncommon for companies to be depicted outdoors surrounded by greenery in the seventeenth century, but in the 1650s artists like Bartholomeus van der Helst increasingly placed them on a terrace with columns and other structural elements in the background, sometimes combined with a drapery. Anthony van Dyck had been using motifs like that in his portraits since the 1620s. The vertical shape behind Van der Merck’s male sitter might have been intended to be a circular pillar like the one in the top right corner, but it is no longer clearly distinguishable. Although the original effect may have been spoiled by wear, a clumsy handling of architectural details is also found in Van der Merck’s 1660 likeness of Willem van der Rijt and his family.¹² There, too, he included a drapery with tassels, and judging by a painting he made of the governors of the Leiden Loridan almshouse it was a favourite device of his in group portraits.¹³ He also employed it in still lifes from time to time.¹⁴

The man shown here is using his right hand to indicate or activate something outside the painting. It would not have been the couple’s children, as is the case in Van der Merck’s far larger family portrait of 1653 in the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem.¹⁵ Although there is no cusping visible, indicating that the picture may have been cut down,¹⁶ it is not certain that the composition has indeed been cropped. At any rate, the position of the signature on the cornice of the pillar does not give the impression that the canvas has been substantially trimmed on the left, the side the man is pointing at.

According to the transfer list of 1885, the painting bears the year ‘1654’.¹⁷ That was adopted at first in the museum’s inventory book but later changed to ‘165.’, which is how it was catalogued in 1976.¹⁸ Not the slightest trace of any date can now be seen. Overzealous cleaning has removed it entirely, along with the last four letters of the signature. However, the reported year of 1654 would fit in well with the women’s dresses, especially the starched, lace-trimmed falling whisk collars and the wide, short cylindrical cuffs.¹⁹ If the date was read correctly at the time, the work is from the artist’s Hague period.

The seated woman has a blue-and-white bowl in her lap filled with citrus fruit and is holding a lemon in her right hand, which could be a reference to marital fidelity in this context.²⁰ Since such products were very expensive at the time, their combination with the dish of Chinese porcelain proclaims the wealth of the patron.²¹ Van der Merck’s talents for still lifes would have come in handy here.

Richard Harmanni, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements