Object data
oil on panel
support: height 72.5 cm × width 58.6 cm
outer size: depth 6 cm (support incl. frame)
Salomon Mesdach (attributed to)
Portrait of Hortensia del Prado (?-1627)
c. 1625
Inscriptions
- label, on the reverse: Hortensia del Prado / Moeder van mijn Moeder Zr. / Joh. Boudaen 1678 (Hortensia del Prado Mother of my late mother Joh. Boudaen 1678)
- inscription, on the reverse: Hortensia del Prado. / Trouwt 1º Jean Fourmenois / 2º Pieter Courten. / Geb: / Overl: 18 Junij 1627. (Hortensia del Prado. Marries 1st Jean Fourmenois, 2nd Pieter Courten. Born Died 18 June 1627.)
- coat of arms, on the reverse: divided horizontally, A, a Moor’s head with silver headdress on a gold field; B, a gold chevron on a black field
- coat of arms, on the reverse: divided horizontally, with 2 further divided horizontally, A, a standing silver ox facing front on a greenfield, B1, three green cloverleafs on a gold field, B2, a green pelican with three chicks on a silver field
- coat of arms, on the reverse: quartered, 1 and 4, a standing black harrier on a gold field, 2 and 3, a black chevron and three white birds on a red field
- inscription, on the reverse: 29
Technical notes
The panel consists of three vertically grained oak planks and is bevelled at top and bottom. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1605. The panel could have been ready for use by 1616, but a date in or after 1622 is more likely. The panel was primed with a thin and smooth, off-white ground layer. There is light grey undermodelling in the sitter’s face and collar. The paint was applied smoothly, with some visible brushstrokes. There is a pentimento to the right of the sitter’s collar.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 5 June 2003
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 30 June 2005
Condition
Fair. There are several dents in the right half of the panel and a crack at upper right. There is some overpainting in the sitter’s face and in the floral pattern of the sitter’s costume. Pinpoint losses appear throughout. The uneven varnish layer is discoloured, matte at the retouchings, and has crazed.
Provenance
...; documented at Kasteel Popkensburg in an 18th-century manuscript;1 ? by descent through the families Boudaen Courten, Van Citters, Verheije van Citters, to Jonkheer Jacob de Witte van Citters (1817-76), The Hague; by whom bequeathed to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague (inv. no. 3239 ), 1876;2 transferred to the museum, 1885
Object number: SK-A-910
Credit line: Jonkheer J. de Witte van Citters Bequest, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Salomon Mesdach (active in Middelburg 1612-34)
Little is known of Mesdach’s life, but his family was probably from Middelburg. Salomon Mesdach is documented there in 1617, 1619, 1622 and 1628. In 1617, he is recorded as a painter and citizen of the town. Two years later, he became the owner of half of a house called ‘den Hasard’ on the citadel in Middelburg. He was dean of the painters’ guild in 1628. Since a sum of money that he had lent to a baker in 1622 was paid back to his son-in-law Abraham Fortuyn in August 1644, he may have died in or before that year.
Very few of his works are known. Documents in which he is mentioned as a ‘conterfeijter’ indicate that he painted portraits. His only signed painting is a group portrait of Balthasar van Vlierden and his family dated 1612.3 Another work by him is a copy after a portrait of the Schaep family.4 In addition, there are two prints by Daniel van Bremden after portraits by Mesdach from 1625 and 1634.
Gerdien Wuestman, 2007
References
Obreen VI, 1884-87, p. 262; Hofstede de Groot 1915a, p. 281; Thieme/Becker XXIV, 1930, p. 428; Wuestman 2005, pp. 43-44, 48, note 8
Entry
Sir Pieter Courten was the son of Guillaume Courten and Margarita Cassier.5 He married a widow, Hortensia del Prado, in Cologne, and settled with her in Middelburg, where they lived in ‘Het Grote Huis’ in Lange Noordstraat, which Courten had commissioned.6 A few houses away lived the poet Jacob Cats, who was a member of their circle. Hortensia del Prado was the model for the virtuous wife whose praises Cats sang in his Houwelyck (Marriage).7 No children were born to the couple. After Hortensia’s death in 1627, Pieter Courten married Elisabeth Honing on 17 March 1629. According to his nephew Pieter Boudaen Courten,8 Pieter Courten fell ill in October of the same year, and died, ‘wasted away’, on 12 January 1630.9
The Rijksmuseum portrait of Pieter Courten (SK-A-2074) comes from the De Witte van Citters Bequest and entered the museum in 1903. Oddly enough, it has never been associated with that of his wife Hortensia del Prado (shown here), which arrived in the museum from the same family collection nearly 20 years earlier.10 The paintings have the same dimensions, very similar frames, and the same compositional setting of an oval, stone framework. Given the dates of death of the two individuals and the differences in the frames, it can be assumed that the two paintings were not made at the same time. Courten’s portrait, with the inscription ‘1630’, must be posthumous, painted either in 1630, the year of his death, or even later. The undated portrait of his wife, who died three years before him, must date from the 1620s, for Hortensia del Prado is wearing the fashion of that period.11
It is possible that the portraits in the Rijksmuseum served as companion pieces. An 18th-century list of paintings in Kasteel Popkensburg mentions the portraits of Pieter Courten and Hortensia del Prado one after the other.12 According to that list, both works had an inscription by Johan Boudaen Courten.13 The strip of vellum with this text is still on the back of Hortensia’s portrait, but it is missing from Pieter Courten’s. It could have been removed, or possibly there was another version of the same portrait, although none is known.
The likeliest people to have commissioned the portraits of Pieter Courten and Hortensia del Prado in Popkensburg are Pieter Boudaen Courten and his wife Catharina Fourmenois. Boudaen Courten was Pieter Courten’s nephew and heir, and Fourmenois was Del Prado’s daughter. The labels written by their son Johan show that both works were in the Boudaen Courten family at an early date.
The portraits of Courten and Del Prado have both been associated with the Middelburg painter Salomon Mesdach. The one of Hortensia del Prado, in particular, displays similarities to the paintings attributed to Mesdach in the Rijksmuseum as regards style and the structure of the paint layers.14 Courten’s portrait is built up in a similar way, with light grey dead-colouring beneath the face and the ruff, but it is hard to say whether the painting is by the same hand, since the face has been heavily overpainted. Ekkart assumes that it is a later copy, partly on the evidence of the weak execution of the ruff, the folds of which were not properly understood.15 However, the condition of the painting and the lack of an original preclude a definitive pronouncement.
There is a second version of Hortensia’s portrait, possibly a replica.16 A modern copy of her portrait by Aat Veldhoen (1934-) was auctioned in 1998.17 The Rijksmuseum has two other portraits of Hortensia del Prado, by Gortzius Geldorp (SK-A-2072 and SK-A-2081) as well as a copper shield of 1625 with the arms of the Del Prado and Courten families (SK-A-928).
Gerdien Wuestman, 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. 181.
Literature
Wuestman 2005, p. 43
Collection catalogues
1887, p. 74, no. 602 (as Holland School); 1903, p. 171, no. 1543 (as Mesdach); 1976, p. 377, no. A 910 (as Mesdach); 2007, no. 181
Citation
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'attributed to Salomon Mesdach, Portrait of Hortensia del Prado (?-1627), c. 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9073
(accessed 10 November 2024 11:50:51).