Portrait of a Young Man, possibly Jacob Francken (1627-after 1656)

c. 1651

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 82.6 cm × width 68.5 cm (oval)

Technical notes

Support The panel consists of three vertically grained oak planks (approx. 17, 32.2 and 19 cm), approx. 0.7 cm thick. The top edge had been trimmed before an oak strip (approx. 2 cm) was added at a later date, presumably to fit the panel into a frame. The reverse is slightly bevelled at the bottom and on the left and right, and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1625. The panel could have been ready for use by 1636, but a date in or after 1642 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The triple ground extends up to the edges of the support. The first layer is a solid, somewhat transparent warm beige. The second ground is a warm beige consisting of white, fine black and a few fine orange pigment particles. The third layer is a warm greyish brown containing white, dark red and yellow pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front. A dark paint, possibly the undermodelling, shimmers through, especially in the head; it was left uncovered in several places, for example around the nose and mouth. The figure was reserved in the background and the collar was left in reserve in the clothes. The paint was applied wet in wet, leaving the handling of the brush visible. The background, in particular, has remained very loose and open, sometimes exposing the ground. The paints are quite opaque overall, except for dark shadows over skin colours. The flesh colours of the face were smoothly applied, in very opaque yellowish and pinkish tones. A drier paint was used for the tufts of hair falling over the forehead and touching the cheeks. Texture is apparent in the hand and face, and was also used for modelling in the black clothes and the thickly executed bonnet. The golden highlights of the brocade on the clothes consist of numerous thick and flowing medium-rich ochre-coloured paints. The sitter’s left eyebrow was placed higher than planned in the undermodelling and the wrist was made broader than its reserve.
Willem de Ridder, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 15 December 2000
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 1 December 2001
paint samples: W. de Ridder, RMA, nos. SK-C-120/1-2, 16 September 2010
infrared photography: W. de Ridder, RMA, 16 September 2010
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 16 September 2010

Condition

Good. The panel is somewhat fragile and a crack is visible at the top, to the right of centre. The left join is open at the top and bottom, the right one only at the bottom. At some point, they were strengthened by canvas strips, wax-resin attached to the panel. There are two small bumps above and slightly to the right of the bonnet. Its thick paint has a very marked craquelure. Slight abrasions of the paint layer throughout have mostly been retouched.

Conservation

W. de Ridder, 2001: complete restoration

Provenance

? commissioned by Jacob Francken (1627-after 1656) or his parents Sebastiaan Francken and Jacobmijne van Casteren, with pendant portrait of his sister Elisabeth Francken (1629-1678), 1651;¹ ? probate inventory, Elisabeth Francken (‘Int sijsalet. Twee achtkantige schilderijen sijnde de Conter:feytsels van d’heer m’ Jacob Francken ende juff’ Elisabeth Francken za[lig]er door Cuyp’), 12 September 1678;²…; from Albertus Brondgeest, Amsterdam fl. 1,900, to Adriaan van der Hoop (1778-1854), Amsterdam, November 1839;³ by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam, with 223 other paintings, 1854;⁴ on loan from the City of Amsterdam to the museum since 10 June 1885⁵

Object number: SK-C-120

Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam (A. van der Hoop Bequest)

The artist

Aelbert Cuyp (Dordrecht 1620 - Dordrecht 1691)

Aelbert Cuyp was baptized in the Reformed Augustijnenkerk in Dordrecht in October 1620 and was a scion of an artistic family. His grandfather Gerrit Gerritsz was a glass painter from Limburg who settled in Dordrecht before 1585, and his father Jacob Gerritsz was one of the city’s leading portraitists in the first half of the seventeenth century. The latter trained his own half-brother Benjamin and probably taught Aelbert as well.

Aelbert Cuyp could turn his hand to pretty well every genre – cityscapes, landscapes and, to a lesser extent, biblical and mythological subjects and portraits. His earliest independent landscapes date from 1639,⁶ but there are pictures of 1641 and 1645 on which he collaborated with his father.⁷ Aelbert took care of the scenery and Jacob did the portraits in them. Drawn sights of The Hague, Utrecht, Amersfoort and Rhenen show that he went on one or more trips through the provinces of Holland, Utrecht and Gelderland, and one of those works was used for another painting that he made with his father in 1641.⁸

Aelbert Cuyp’s landscapes from the early 1640s, only a few of which bear the year of execution, are clearly influenced by Jan van Goyen. Around 1645 he began taking an interest in the Dutch Italianate painters, chiefly Jan Both, who had returned from Italy in 1642. Initially this led to his creation of imaginary Arcadian spaces drenched in a southern light, but after about 1650 his depictions of Dutch city and countryside also took on the golden brown glow of the Italian evening sun, in contrast to a cool sky. There is some uncertainty about the precise evolution of these works, because none of them are dated after 1645 – unlike a few portraits that Cuyp made in the 1650s, the last of them in 1655.⁹

Around 1651-52 Cuyp went on a journey to Nijmegen and from there to Elten and Cleves in Germany. The record of this can be seen in a whole series of sketches and paintings of the region. In the 1650s Cuyp was commissioned by a number of leading families in Dordrecht, and in 1658 he himself became a member of the elite through his marriage to Cornelia Boschman, the widow of one of the regents. Although her wills of 1659, 1664 and 1679 mention works that could have been made after that date, it seems that Cuyp abandoned art when he married. Houbraken says that he taught Barent van Calraat in the 1660s and modernized an earlier picture of his in that period,¹⁰ but there are no paintings that must have been executed after the 1650s. Cuyp now began serving in a variety of administrative and ecclesiastical posts. In 1659 he was elected deacon of the Reformed Church, a function that he also carried out from 1667 to 1672, when he was appointed an elder. In 1673, 1675 and 1676 he was a governor of the Plague House, and from 1680 to 1682 a member of the High Court of Justice of South Holland. In 1689, two years before his death, Cuyp was taxed 210 guilders, which meant that he had a considerable fortune of 42,000 guilders.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

References
M. Balen, Beschryvinge der stad Dordrecht […], Dordrecht 1677, pp. 186, 909; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, pp. 248-49; R. van Eynden and A. van der Willigen, Geschiedenis der vaderlandsche schilderkunst, sedert de helft der XVIII eeuw, I, Haarlem 1816, pp. 381-85; C. Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van den vroegsten tot op onzen tijd, VI, Amsterdam 1864, pp. 308-10; G.H. Veth, ‘Over de Cuyps en Bol’, De Nederlandsche Spectator 29 (1884), pp. 117-18; G.H. Veth, ‘Aelbert Cuyp, Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp en Benjamin Cuyp’, Oud Holland 2 (1884), pp. 233-90, esp. pp. 256-90 (documents); G.H. Veth, ‘Aanteekeningen omtrent eenige Dordrechtsche schilders, XIV: Aelbert Cuyp’, Oud Holland 6 (1888), pp. 142-48; Lilienfeld in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, VIII, Leipzig 1913, pp. 227-30; A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, pp. 548-67 (documents); Seelig in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XXIII, Munich/Leipzig 1999, p. 235

Entry

This portrait of a young man in sumptuous imaginary dress painted by Aelbert Cuyp probably had a pendant originally in the shape of a likeness of a 21-year-old woman dated 1651 in a private collection size (fig. a).¹¹ This is suggested not only by the similar dimensions but also by the costumes and attributes, which associate the figures with hunting.¹² The sitters remain unidentified, but it seems that they could well be the brother and sister Jacob (1627-after 1656) and Elisabeth Francken (1629-1678), the eldest children of Jacobmijne van Casteren and Sebastiaan Francken (1597-1651), a justice at the Court of Holland. Elisabeth died on 20 May 1678, and her probate inventory of that year lists two octagonal portraits of her and Jacob by someone called Cuyp, which are probably these companion pieces.¹³ They are on oval panels, but these were often set in octagonal frames and were described as such in inventories.¹⁴ A more important argument is provided by the inscription on the woman’s picture, which states that she was 21 in 1651, which is a precise match for Elisabeth, who was baptized on 1 December 1629.

This was not the first time that the two Francken children were portrayed. There is a painting of 1635 by Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp in which both of them, aged 6 and 8, and their younger sister Cornelia (1633-before c. 1640) are seen in a landscape near The Hague.¹⁵ It is mentioned in Elisabeth’s inventory as well.¹⁶ Another work that is listed there was made by Pieter Codde and shows the Francken family on the beach at Scheveningen.¹⁷ Cornelia is missing, and Roelof, born in 1635, is the youngest now. The painting is undated, but given the apparent ages of the children it would be from 1638-42.¹⁸ Elisabeth and Jacob are once again depicted as remarkably close siblings. Jacob, attended by a couple of hounds, is holding up a dead hare behind his sister’s back.

The panel in the Rijksmuseum is notable for its relatively strong chiaroscuro effects and the loose but deft brushwork. Both the costume and face are a little more striking and livelier than in Cuyp’s earliest portraits of 1649.¹⁹ Wheelock has suggested that in the present picture Cuyp may have been inspired by the two Dordrecht artists Ferdinand Bol and Paulus Lesire and their paintings of the 1640s ‘in which sitters are similarly modelled in strong light and dressed in exotic costumes’.²⁰ The young man, who is shown half-length turned one quarter to the right, is wearing a black doublet with the sleeves slashed and edged with gold braid, an ornate small collar, a white, gold-fringed neckerchief, and a bonnet decorated with two ostrich plumes. He is holding the barrel of a gun in his left hand. The woman in the presumed companion piece is dressed equally sumptuously. She is holding the game: a pair of songbirds tied together with willow twigs. Hunting is often associated with love and courtship in emblems and pastoral poetry, which is why Wheelock thought that the pendants must have been made to mark a marriage or betrothal,²¹ but in fact these are probably a brother and sister who were fond of hunting, as illustrated by Codde’s family portrait. Be that as it may, the pictures testify to the aristocratic pretensions of the Franckens, who owned the Hoeckenburg country estate on the Haagse Trekvliet near Voorburg.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

E.-J.-T. Thoré (pseud. W. Bürger), Musées de la Hollande, II, Paris 1860, p. 144; C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, II, Esslingen/Paris 1908, p. 41, no. 127; A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, p. 336, no. 93; Wheelock in A.K. Wheelock Jr (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001-02, pp. 144-45, 198; W.T. Kloek, Aelbert Cuyp: Land, Water, Light, Amsterdam 2002, pp. 18-19

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 33, no. 254; 1903, p. 79, no. 748; 1934, p. 77, no. 748; 1960, p. 79, no. 748; 1976, p. 184, no. C 120

Citation

Erlend de Groot, 2022, 'Aelbert Cuyp, Portrait of a Young Man, possibly Jacob Francken (1627-after 1656), c. 1651', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8189

(accessed 22 November 2024 16:45:21).

Figures

fig. a Aelbert Cuyp, *Portrait of a Young Woman, probably Elisabeth Francken (1629-1678)*, 1651. Oil on panel, 80.5 x 68.5 cm. USA, private collection