Left wing of a Memorial Tablet with Eight Male Portraits, probably Willem Jelysz van Soutelande (?-1515/16) and Family, with Sts James the Greater (inner wing), and the Van Soutelande Coat of Arms (outer wing)

Entry

This panel and its companion, see SK-A-1188-B and fig. a, with portraits of donors were originally the wings of a memorial tablet, the centre panel of which is lost. Kneeling in the foreground of the left wing is a man in a suit of armour and tunic whose palm frond proclaims him to be a member of the Brotherhood of the Jerusalem Pilgrims. As such he had made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and the Holy Sepulchre.⁶ His wife kneels in the foreground of the right wing. Members of their family kneel behind them, including five nuns and a monk. The little girl in the red dress on the right wing appears to be a later addition, as does the second boy from the left shown in profile in the back row on the left wing. Both groups are behind prie-dieux on which there are open prayer books. They are accompanied by St James the Greater with his staff and pilgrim’s hat on the left wing and by Mary Magdalen with her jar of ointment on the right wing.

There are two coats of arms on the red cloths covering the prie-dieux, and they are repeated in trompe l’oeil form in niches on the outer wings. There are two other coats held by angels in the sky. The first pair was identified by Thierry de Bye Dólleman as the coats of Willem Jelysz van Soutelande (?-1515/16), councillor and Commissioner for Orphans in Haarlem, and his wife Kathrijn Willemsdr van der Graft (?-1490/91). One of their sons, Jelys (later Gillis) van Soutelande (c. 1490-1547), is probably the man immediately behind his father.⁷ Thierry de Bye Dólleman also identified the coats of arms in the sky. The one on the left with a decapitated silver lion is that of the prominent Haarlem citizen Jacob de Wael van Rozenburg (?-1524), while the one on the right wing is supposedly that of the Van der Graft family. However, on the basis of the left-hand coat it can be identified as that of Jacob de Wael’s wife, Margriet van Waveren, whose family bore the same arms as the Van der Grafts.⁸ The second couple are not depicted on the wings, but it is very possible that they were on the lost centre panel.⁹ A similar construction is found in the memorial tablet for the Van Noordwijk family in Bonn which Jan Mostaert painted around 1514 (fig. b). The donors Anna van Noordwijk and Gijsbrecht van Duivenvoorde are portrayed on the wings, while Anna’s parents and grandparents are on the centre panel.¹⁰

If the coats of arms on the Amsterdam wings are not later additions, and provided Thierry de Bye Dólleman’s identification is correct, there may have been blood ties between the Van Soutelande and De Wael van Rozenburg families, because it was unusual to depict unrelated families together in a memorial tablet.¹¹ All we know, however, is that Jacob de Wael and Willem van Soutelande were both members of the Haarlem Brotherhood of the Jerusalem Pilgrims. Their names appear on a list below the group portrait of the members painted by Jan van Scorel around 1528/30.¹²

When the Rijksmuseum panels were bought in 1885 it was already suspected that they were by the same artist as the ‘painter of the works of charity in Alkmaar’.¹³ Van Gelder-Schrijver and Friedländer included them in the master’s oeuvre, although the latter found the panels rather coarsely executed.¹⁴ Hoogewerff, who identified the artist as Cornelis Buys I, regarded them as workshop products.¹⁵ Despite the fact that they are portraits, the use of colour and the detailing of the figures are very reminiscent of the Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity, the Master of Alkmaar’s core work. The coarseness that Friedländer and Hoogewerff saw relative to the Charity panels is not apparent to us. The draughtsman-like brushwork and the elaboration of details, such as the outlined eyelids, the firmly painted noses and the marked drapery folds all point to the hand of the Master of Alkmaar and justify the attribution to him.

The way in which the flowing landscapes are painted cannot be assessed against the Polyptych with the Seven Works of Charity because of its urban setting. Although Bangs and Van Suchtelen suggested that the landscapes may have been painted by another artist, they are very comparable to those in the Triptych with the Adoration of the Magi (SK-C-1364) and in the two wings with The High Priest Refusing Joachim’s Sacrifice and The Meeting of Joachim and Anna under the Golden Gate in Haarlem, both of which are convincingly attributed to the Master of Alkmaar.¹⁶

Although the dendrochronology indicates that the panels could have been ready for use by 1490, a date around 1516 is more likely, given the suspected portrait of the son of the Soutelande-van der Graft family. Jelys van Soutelande, who was born around 1490, must be at least 20 or older in the painting. He may have commissioned the memorial tablet after his father’s death in 1515/16. If that was the case, the Master of Alkmaar’s style does not seem to have developed since 1504.

As Thierry de Bye Dólleman pointed out, the triptych could have been placed over an altar near the family grave in St Bavo’s in Haarlem.¹⁷ It is conceivable that the centre panel was lost in the Iconoclasm or later, and that the wings ended up back in the family. In any case, it is likely that they then served as family portraits. The panels were then sawn down, with the sawn-off pieces being reused to make the panels rectangular. It was probably at an early date that they were put into the single frame they had when the museum bought them.¹⁸ The memorial tablet by Mostaert mentioned above (fig. b) might indicate the original shape of the wings.

(J. Niessen)