Object data
oil on panel
support: height 35 cm × width 27 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. frame)
David Bailly
Young Man with a Fur Hat
c. 1635 - c. 1640
Technical notes
The support, a single vertically grained oak panel, has been thinned down and cradled. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1616. The panel could have been ready for use by 1627, but a date in or after 1633 is more likely. The white ground layer is visible along the grain. The original paint layer shows little brushmarking.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 9 June 2003
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 October 2005
Condition
Poor. The vertical slats of the cradle have left an imprint on the front of the painting. Abrasion is severe throughout, and the figure’s hair and fur cap have been stripped and overpainted. The face has been extensively retouched and reinforced. The varnish is discoloured.
Provenance
…; from Jonkheer Jacob Eduard van Heemskerck van Beest (1828-94), Utrecht, The Hague and Dalfsen, fl. 20,000, as anonymous, with the rest of his collection, en bloc, to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague (inv. no. 3927), 1878; transferred to the museum, as school of Rembrandt, 1885
Object number: SK-A-945
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
David Bailly (Leiden c. 1584/86 - Leiden 1657)
David Bailly was the son of a calligrapher and fencing-master who had emigrated to Leiden from Antwerp. According to the Leiden city chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers – the principal source for information on the artist – Bailly was born in 1584, although later documents indicate that it was 1586. He was first apprenticed in Leiden to the otherwise unknown surgeon and painter Adriaen Verburgh, before becoming Cornelis van der Voort’s pupil in Amsterdam, to which his family had moved in 1602. In the winter of 1608, Bailly embarked on a five year trip, first spending a year in Hamburg and then travelling by way of Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Augsburg and other towns to Rome and Venice. On his return to Leiden, which he reached in 1613, he once again travelled through Germany working for local princely courts, such as that of the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. No works have survived from the period before his return to Leiden, where he established himself as a portraitist. From between 1621 and 1633 he executed numerous meticulous, small-scale drawings of Leiden professors and students, as well as fellow artists like Jan Pynas. His earliest signed and dated painting is the Rijksmuseum’s Portrait of Aertje Witsen of 1626 (SK-A-16). After 1633, Bailly apparently concentrated on portrait painting, as there are few drawings from after that date. In addition to Leiden citizens, his sitters included such Amsterdam patricians as Pieter Dircksz Hasselaer and Gerrit Pietersz Schaep. His greatest contribution to 17th-century Dutch art is his combination of portraiture and vanitas still lifes, which reached a high point in his last dated painting, the 1651 Self-Portrait with Vanitas Still Life.1
Relatively late in life, in 1642, Bailly married Agneta van Swanenburgh. In 1648, he was among the founding members of the Leiden Guild of St Luke, becoming its dean the following year. A few months prior to his death in 1657, Bailly took on the lucrative position of steward to the Theological College of the States of Holland and West Friesland. His known pupils were his nephews, the still-life painters Harmen (1612-after 1655) and Pieter van Steenwijck (c. 1615-after 1654).
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Orlers 1641, pp. 371-72; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 190; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 118; Obreen V, 1882-83, pp. 41, 172, 185, 187-89, 196, 242; Moes in Thieme/Becker II, 1908, p. 372; Bruyn 1951, pp. 150-56; De Baar 1973; De Baar 1975; Trauzeddel in Saur VI, 1992, pp. 320-21
Entry
The attribution of this tronie of a young man wearing a fur hat is based on comparison with Bailly’s signed 1637 tronie in the Louvre (fig. a). Although retouched and reinforced, the plasticity of the face in the present painting, especially the rendering of the highlights in the eyes, nose and lips, can be closely compared to that in the Louvre painting. Common as well to both of these depictions of young men in fanciful dress are the slightly parted lips and sideways placement of the eyes, which lends them a vivacious quality. Bailly may well have taken his cue from Rembrandt’s tronies not only for the subject matter of these two paintings, but for their seemingly spontaneous poses as well.
Bruyn, who does not seem to have been aware of the painting’s poor state of conservation, argued that it was executed considerably later than the Louvre tronie.2 A date around the same period as the latter painting would be more appropriate. Such a dating is supported by the dendrochronology of the panel.3 A copy of the Rijksmuseum tronie is in Kingston, Canada.4
Jonathan Bikker, 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. 18.
Literature
Bruyn 1951, p. 219
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 37, no. 408; 1934, p. 35, no. 408; 1960, p. 28, no. 408; 1976, p. 95, no. A 945; 2007, no. 18
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'David Bailly, Young Man with a Fur Hat, c. 1635 - 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.5879
(accessed 28 December 2024 06:29:53).