Woman Playing the Virginal

c. 1637

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 38.6 cm × width 29.6 cm

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.7 cm thick on the left and approx. 1.2 cm on the right. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1620. The panel could have been ready for use by 1631, but a date in or after 1637 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, beige ground extends up to the edges of the support. It consists of beige pigment particles with a minute addition of very fine earth pigments.
Underdrawing Infrared photography revealed an underdrawing in a liquid or dry medium, also partly visible to the naked eye, consisting of subtle hatchings defining the volume of the folds in some of the shaded parts of the red dress.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The semi-transparent brown first lay-in has remained partly visible in the dark background, where it was applied thinly, allowing the ground to show through; the lighter colours are thicker and more opaque. The painting was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light. Except for the boy and the woman’s hands, the figures were left in reserve, and then executed wet in wet. Transparent dark glazes were used to create dark shadows, and highlights in the faces, lace and virginal are impasted. Several major changes were made to the composition. Above the monkey, for instance, there was initially a mirror with an ornate frame and a parrot below it, and a lute was hanging on the wall above the girl’s head. Moreover, the woman’s right eye was higher and her cap looked different.
Jessica Roeders, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

X-radiography: RMA, no. 1567, 28 June 1983
infrared photography: J. Roeders, RMA, 4 February 2008
paint samples: J. Roeders, RMA, nos. SK-C-140/1-2, 13 February 2008
technical report: J. Roeders, RMA, 13 February 2008
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 10 June 2008

Condition

Good. The panel has become slightly convex. There are a few old retouchings that are rather matte. The varnish has slightly yellowed.

Conservation

M. Zeldenrust, 1983: complete restoration

Provenance

...; ? probate inventory, Jan Miense Molenaer, Haarlem, 10 October 1668, in the vestibule (‘Een vroutje op de Clauwe Zimbael spelende van Molenaer’);¹…; anonymous sale, Amsterdam (C.S. Roos et al.), 18 October 1819, no. 21, as D. Hals (‘In een Binnenvertrek zit eene bevallige Vrouw op het klavier te spelen, daar twee kinderen naar staan te luisteren, in het verschiet komt een heer de kamer binnen treden; bevallig op P., h. 15, br. 12 d. [38.5 x 30.8 cm]’), fl. 71, to De Vries;²…; purchased for fl. 350 by Adriaan van der Hoop (1778-1854), Amsterdam, as Dirck Hals, June 1832;³ by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam, as Dirck Hals, with 223 other paintings, 1854;⁴ on loan from the City of Amsterdam to the museum since 30 June 1885⁵

Object number: SK-C-140

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

The artist

Jan Miense Molenaer (Haarlem c. 1610/11 - Haarlem 1668)

A document of 21 November 1637 states that Molenaer was about 27 years old, which means he was most probably born in 1610, the year of his parents’ marriage, or 1611. He was the oldest son of a Haarlem tailor and his second wife. Two of Molenaer’s brothers, Bartholomeus and Nicolaes, were also artists, and his sister Maria was married to one. Although it is not recorded, Molenaer is considered to have been a pupil of Frans Hals. His four earliest dated paintings are from 1629 and show the influence of Dirck Hals as much, if not more, than that of his older brother Frans.⁶ Molenaer is first mentioned in the contribution list of the Guild of St Luke in 1634. Two years later he wed the artist Judith Leyster in Heemstede. Although his parents were almost certainly Catholics, he married in the Reformed Church. It was also in 1636 that he ran into money problems for the first of many times. By mid-1637 he had moved to Amsterdam, where he soon received the substantial commission for a large group portrait of one of the city’s most important patrician families. That picture, The Wedding Portrait of Willem van Loon and Margaretha Bas, was completed before the end of 1637.⁷ Predominantly a genre painter, in 1639 Molenaer produced one of the few religious works in his oeuvre, the monumental Mocking of Christ, which was probably ordered by the Sint-Odulphuskerk in Assendelft.⁸ Peasant imagery figured only sporadically in Molenaer’s art before his relocation to Amsterdam, but eventually became his major focus after 1640. His principle influences in this genre were Adriaen Brouwer and Isack and Adriaen van Ostade.

By the end of 1648, Molenaer and his family moved out of Amsterdam and divided their time between Haarlem and Heemstede, where they had bought a manor. Molenaer was to pay for this house and one he bought in Amsterdam in 1655 with a combination of cash and paintings. As early as 1656 the couple left the latter city once more to settle in the Heemstede estate. In the period that followed Molenaer was repeatedly involved in court cases involving money owed by and to him. Both ill, he and Leyster drew up a will on 6 November 1659 in Heemstede. His wife died three months later but Molenaer recovered and went on to produce the most accomplished works of his later career. He initially continued to live in the Heemstede manor but eventually rented a house in Haarlem where he spent the remaining five years of his life. Molenaer’s last dated picture is the 1667 Merry Company at a Table.⁹ He died on 15 September 1668 and was buried in the Grote Kerk.

While Ampzing, who did acknowledge Judith Leyster, did not mention Molenaer in 1628, Schrevelius referred to him in 1648 only in passing as Leyster’s husband.

Jonathan Bikker, 2022

References
S. Ampzing, Beschryvinge ende lof der stad Haerlem in Holland, Haarlem 1628 (reprint Amsterdam 1974), p. 370; T. Schrevelius, Harlemias, Haarlem 1648, p. 384; A.P. 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 Gilde aldaar, Haarlem 1866, pp. 163-64; A. Bredius, ‘Het verblijf van Jan Miense Molenaer te Amsterdam, in documenten’, in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], VII, Rotterdam 1888-90, pp. 289-304; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, I, The Hague 1915, pp. 1-26; ibid., VII, 1921, pp. 154-61; Schneider in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXV, Leipzig 1931, pp. 30-32; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lucasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1798, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, passim; E. Broersen, ‘“Judita Leystar”: A Painter of “Good, Keen Sense”’, in J.A. Welu and P. Biesboer (eds.), Judith Leyster: A Dutch Master and her World, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Halsmuseum)/Worcester (Worcester Art Museum) 1993, pp. 15-38, esp. pp. 21-37; Weller in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XXI, New York 1996, pp. 813-15; D.P. Weller, ‘Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age’, in D.P. Weller, C. von Bogendorf Rupprath and M. Westermann, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, exh. cat. Raleigh (North Carolina Museum of Art)/Indianapolis (Indianapolis Museum of Art)/Manchester (Currier Museum of Art) 2002-03, pp. 9-25; I. van Thiel-Stroman, ‘Biographies 15th-17th Century’, in P. Biesboer et al., Painting in Haarlem 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 99-363, esp. pp. 241-45; Biesboer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XC, Munich/Leipzig 2016, pp. 215-16

Entry

The virginal appears in five works from Jan Miense Molenaer’s early Haarlem period. The Rijksmuseum painting and one other panel dated 1634 in a private collection are the only two in which a woman playing the instrument is the main motif.¹⁰ Both show three figures in contemporary dress in an interior with a checkerboard patterned floor and an open door in the right background. The Rijksmuseum composition has a lower vantage point and deeper recession, and Weller dates it somewhat later than the 1634 picture on the basis of the ‘slightly more polished and descriptive painting application in the costumes and features of the sitters’.¹¹ But not only is the brushwork superior, the virginal, although much too wide,¹² does not awkwardly tilt upwards as it recedes in space like the instrument in the 1634 panel. The anatomy of the main figure is also more accomplished, as her thighs do not appear as freakishly long as those of her counterpart. A somewhat later origin of the Rijksmuseum picture is supported by the dendrochronology, which gives 1631 as the earliest year of execution but indicates that a date after 1637 would be more likely.¹³ The strong bright colours, somewhat wobbly construction of the interior, and the relatively large-scale figures are characteristic of Molenaer’s output in the first decade of his career.

Unlike the 1634 painting, a male figure is seen at the threshold of the open door at the back. That this is a gentleman caller is suggested by the courting couple shown in the landscape on the open lid of the virginal. The original design for the picture included a lute, which was probably meant for the suitor to play.¹⁴ Music-making was a cherished metaphor for the harmony of love.¹⁵ A mirror that was also initially planned may have had amorous connotations as well, as an emblem by Pieter Cornelisz Hooft showing a man observing a woman playing a virginal includes a vignette of a cupid holding a mirror capturing the sun. According to Hooft’s elucidation, love reflects its source in the beloved just as the mirror reflects the sunlight.¹⁶ The fettered monkey, a motif already employed by Molenaer a few years earlier in his 1633 Allegory of Fidelity,¹⁷ was probably intended as a warning against sensuality. The animal was associated with the sanguine humour, which caused sensuality, and a chained one could stand for ‘voluntary imprisonment by vice’; the monkey is so attached to its self-indulgence that it fully accepts its captivity.¹⁸ The birdcage in Woman Playing the Virginal may also refer to love’s shackles, but then in a positive way. An emblem with a confined parrot in Jacob Cats’s Sinne- en minnebeelden has the motto ‘Amissa libertate laetior’ (Happy in slavery), and a verse referring to the ‘sweet slavery’ of love.¹⁹ Molenaer’s inclusion of a young girl and boy in the present painting suggests that the woman’s choices in love not only have consequences for herself but serve an exemplary function as well.

Weller rightly rejected the old identification of the children in Woman Playing the Virginal as the two children of Molenaer and Judith Leyster who survived infancy, Helena (1643-after 1689) and Constantijn (1650-1671), since they were born after the painting was executed.²⁰ In fact, they resemble the boy and girl on the far right of Molenaer’s Self-Portrait with Family Members of around 1634-36 in Haarlem, who have been convincingly recognized as the artist’s youngest brother Nicolaes and his sister Lucia.²¹ Weller did, however, accept the long-standing identification of the woman at the virginal as Leyster, and even went so far as to claim that the sketchy male figure in the doorway is Molenaer himself. Both also appear in his Duet,²² and according to Weller the two works are genre-like portraits documenting Molenaer and Leyster’s life together. The Duet ‘could, in fact, have served as the couple’s marriage portrait’, while Woman Playing the Virginal ‘may have focused on their courtship’.²³ Although the artist often blurred the line between portraiture and genre, a likelier explanation for the appearance of Molenaer himself, his wife and siblings in these two pictures is that he simply used models that were at hand. At any rate, the tiny stature and cursory execution of the man in the doorway in the Rijksmuseum painting make it unlikely that he was intended to be a likeness, and one can also question the resemblance of the woman playing the virginal to Leyster’s Self-Portrait in Washington.²⁴

Jonathan Bikker, 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. 120 (as Dirck Hals); A. Bredius and W. von Bode, ‘Der Haarlemer Maler Johannes Molenaer in Amsterdam’, Jahrbuch der Königlich Preussischen Kunstsammlungen 11 (1890), pp. 65-78, esp. p. 74; A. Bredius, ‘Jan Miense Molenaer: Nieuwe gegevens omtrent zijn leven en zijn werk’, Oud Holland 26 (1908), pp. 41-42; G.D. Gratama, ‘Het Portret van Judith Leyster door Frans Hals’, Oud Holland 47 (1930), pp. 71-75, esp. pp. 73-74; Weller in D.P. Weller, C. von Bogendorf Rupprath and M. Westermann, Jan Miense Molenaer: Painter of the Dutch Golden Age, exh. cat. Raleigh (North Carolina Museum of Art)/Indianapolis (Indianapolis Museum of Art)/Manchester (Currier Museum of Art) 2002-03, pp. 133-35, no. 23, with earlier literature

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 115, no. 974; 1903, p. 181, no. 1635; 1934, p. 194, no. 1635; 1960, p. 210, no. 1635; 1976, p. 391, no. C 140

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2022, 'Jan Miense Molenaer, Woman Playing the Virginal, c. 1637', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4616

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