Empty Room with a Hearth

Cornelis Bega (Haarlem 1631/32 - Haarlem 1664)

Baptized on 22 (?) January 1632, he was the youngest son of a prosperous Catholic family of artists in Haarlem. His father, Pieter Jansz Begijn (1600/05-1648), was a goldsmith, silversmith and sculptor, and his mother, Maria Cornelisdr (1611-1681), was the daughter of the renowned Mannerist artist Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (1562-1638), half of whose estate (gold, silver, paintings, drawings and prints) she inherited. Bega was almost certainly named for his maternal grandfather. His brother Dominicus Jansz Bagijn (?-1636) was a carver, and several of his paternal forebears were civic architects, including his grandfather, Jan Pietersz Bagijn (?-1628), his great-grandfather Pieter Pietersz Bagijn (?-1600); and his uncle Claes Pietersz Bagijn (1558-1632), whose son (i.e. Bega’s cousin) was the still-life painter Willem Claesz. Heda (1594-1680), who took the name of his mother. Another cousin, on his father’s side, was the decorative painter Pieter de Grebber (c. 1600-1652/53).

According to Houbraken, Bega studied under Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685).¹ This was presumably before 24 April 1653, when he embarked on a journey through Germany, Switzerland and France, in the company of fellow Haarlemmers Vincent Laurensz van der Vinne (1628-1702) and Joost Boelen (?-?).² Bega was certainly back in Haarlem by September 1654, when he joined the Guild of St Luke, in which he was active for a decade, until 1664 (the year of his untimely death, probably from the plague).³ The costs of his expensive funeral at the church of St Bavo, Haarlem, were paid on 30 August 1664.⁴

As a painter, Bega was strongly influenced by the genre works of his teacher Ostade, but as a draughtsman he belonged to a distinctive group of Haarlem artists, including Gerrit Berckheyde (1638-1698) and Leendert van der Cooghen (1632-1681), who from the 1650s onwards developed a style of figure drawing – mostly single figure studies – characterized by highly precise delineation and sharp hatching.⁵ These studies were executed mostly in red chalk on white paper or black and white chalk on blue paper. Bega’s figure drawings can be recognized by their regular hatching, pronounced light and dark contrasts, and clearly demarcated forms.

Carolyn Mensing, 2019

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, I (1718), pp. 349-50; M.A. Scott, Cornelis Bega (1631/32-1664) as Painter and Draughtsman, 2 vols., Ann Arbor 1984 (PhD diss., University of Maryland); M.A. Scott in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, 34 vols., London/New York 1996, III, p. 495; M.A. Scott, ‘Bega, Cornelis’, in J. Turner (ed.), The Grove Dictionary of Art: From Rembrandt to Vermeer. 17th-century Dutch Artists, London 2000, pp. 16-17; I. van Thiel-Stroman, ‘Cornelis Pietersz Bega’, in P. Biesboer and N. Köhler (eds.), Painting in Haarlem 1500-1850. The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 100-02; P. Biesboer, ‘Cornelis Bega (Haarlem, 1631-1664): Eine Biografie’, in P. van den Brink and B.W. Lindemann (eds.), Cornelis Bega: Eleganz und raue Sitten, exh. cat. Aachen (Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum)/Berlin (Gemäldegalerie) 2012, pp. 25-29