Officers and Other Civic Guardsmen of the IIIrd District of Amsterdam, under the Command of Captain Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh and Lieutenant Nanningh Florisz Cloeck

Entry

The present painting is the only civic guard piece by an Utrecht master to have survived, and Moreelse, together with Frans Hals, were the only artists not resident in Amsterdam to receive commissions from that city’s guard companies.⁵ Moreelse’s portrait shows 14 civic guardsmen from District III, which extended roughly from Damrak west to the Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal (Spuistraat), and was bounded by Kolksteeg on the north, and Dirk van Hasseltsteeg on the south. The names of the captain and lieutenant were recorded by Gerard Schaep in his 1653 list of portraits in the three civic guard headquarters in Amsterdam.⁶ The painting hung in the Kloveniersdoelen, the headquarters of the arquebusiers’ civic guard.

Standing to the left of the ensign is the captain, Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh (1555-1625), who is shown wearing an ornamental suit of armour and holding a short officer’s pike decorated with a large tassel in his right hand. Hoyngh also wears a chain with a portrait medallion of Prince Maurits.⁷ It is not known when or for what reason Hoyngh received this medallion, but perhaps it had something to do with Maurits’s visit to Amsterdam in 1613, on which occasion the city’s entire civic guard presented itself to the prince.⁸ Hoyngh, a Counter-Remonstrant, was a cloth merchant and dyer who lived in a house called ‘de Swarte Leeuw’ in Nieuwendijk (no. 156), a street in District III.⁹ In 1618 and 1620, he served as one of the city’s four burgomasters.

The lieutenant, Nanningh Florisz Cloeck (1567-1624), stands to the right of the ensign and holds a partisan. Cloeck was a Remonstrant, and a merchant and soap manufacturer by profession, and from 1607 to 1620 he was Commissioner of the Muster.¹⁰ He also lived in District III, in a house called ‘’t Wapen van Schagen’, the present-day Damrak no. 44. Unfortunately the identities of the ensign, who holds the red and white banner in the middle of the composition, and the other 11 civic guardsmen have not come down to us.

Tümpel suggested that it was the appointment of Hoyngh and Cloeck to captain and lieutenant in the third district that led to the commission of the present portrait.¹¹ By 1616, however, Hoyngh had already been captain for at least 20 years, as he was portrayed as such in a 1596 civic guard piece by Pieter Isaacsz.¹² The lieutenant in Pieter Isaacsz’s group portrait is Wijbrant Appelman, who died the year the painting was completed. Nanningh Florisz Cloeck may, therefore, have already taken over the position of lieutenant in District III in 1596.¹³ While it is not known when exactly he became lieutenant, in 1620 the pro-Remonstrant Cloeck was forced to resign his commission for making disapproving remarks about the Counter-Remonstrant burgomaster, Reijnier Pauw.¹⁴ It is interesting to note that one of the three burgomasters who called for this resignation was Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh.

The fact that Moreelse received this commission indicates that he already had a significant reputation outside Utrecht by 1616. The composition of his civic guard piece, however, is by no means innovative. The placement of the figures in two rows parallel to the picture plane, the figures in the second row shown higher behind a balustrade, is a compositional type that was popular in the 16th century and already employed in the earliest known independent civic guard piece in Amsterdam, from 1529.¹⁵ It is, perhaps, significant, that that painting hung in the arquebusiers’ headquarters, that is to say the same building where Moreelse’s portrait would be displayed. It cannot be claimed, however, that Moreelse was reviving an old compositional type, as Frans Badens had shown the civic guardsmen of District VII in the same manner around 1608.¹⁶ Compared to the 16th-century portraits for which this composition type was employed, and even Badens’s painting, Moreelse’s appears modern, as the figures are not pressed together and have a convincing voluminousness.¹⁷ Moreelse appears also to have followed Badens’s example in placing the two sergeants, identifiable by their halberds, at the extreme left and right in the bottom row. Like Badens’s painting as well, Moreelse’s includes an opening in the middle of the composition. In this case it provides a view into a series of interior spaces. The setting of the painting does not reflect the architecture of the arquebusiers’ headquarters, the tower ‘Swych Wtrecht’, but is fanciful.¹⁸ Apart from their obvious association with cannon balls, the two stone spheres on the balustrade also carried associations with the virtues of constancy and wisdom.¹⁹

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. 216.