Portrait of a Young Woman with Three Children

c. 1668 - c. 1670

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 62 cm × width 76.3 cm
outer size: depth 8 cm (support incl. SK-L-4110)

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been preserved, though severely damaged. Shallow cusping is present on all sides.
Preparatory layers The triple, smooth ground extends over the tacking edges. The first, orange-red layer contains mostly red and a few black pigment particles. The second, much thinner, light orange layer consists of small and large white pigment particles and a few red and black pigments. The third, thin layer, or imprimatura, is very dark grey to black and contains mainly black and a few white pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends over the tacking edges. The composition was built up from the back to the front, without the use of reserves. The sitters appear to have been blocked in with white paint and were very straightforwardly worked up wet in wet. Whereas faces, hands and hair were delicately rendered, the clothing and curtains were done more loosely and sometimes even crudely. The paint layer is smooth overall, with only some brushstrokes visible in areas containing a lot of white pigment, such as part of the clothing. X-radiography revealed several changes to the composition. At first the woman wore a different type of collar, which also reached higher, and her sleeve exposed more of the white blouse. Her face was placed slightly higher and turned to the right, her eyes on the boy with a cravat. The latter, not wearing a cap, was returning her gaze and pointed with his (white-cuffed) left arm toward the infant. The swaddling around the child extended further down, a large part of it now covered with the green of the blanket.
Willem de Ridder, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: W. de Ridder, RMA, nos. SK-A-1192/1-2, 12 March 2008
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 12 March 2008
X-radiography: J. van der Brugge-Mulder, RMA, nos. SK-A-1192/A1-2, B1-2, 4 January 2019

Condition

Fair. The paint layer is fragile and shows strong craquelure with raised paint along the cracks. Slight abrasion as well as discoloured retouching can be found throughout. The varnish is discoloured.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1893: canvas lined

Provenance

…; collection Jacob Wybrand Yntema (1779-1858), Arnhem;¹ his daughter, E.S. Yntema, and her husband, Corstiaan Hendrikus de Swart (1818-1897), Arnhem;² by whom donated to the museum, 10 August 1885³

Object number: SK-A-1192

Credit line: Gift of C.H. de Swart, Arnhem

The artist

Wallerant Vaillant (Lille 1623 - Amsterdam 1677)

Wallerant Vaillant was born in Lille on 30 May 1623 to Jean Vaillant and Marie Warlop. He was brought up in that southern Netherlandish city, where his father worked in the silk industry. He trained as a painter in Antwerp with Erasmus Quellinus II, who received payment of 150 guilders for a year’s tuition on 17 September 1639. The family moved to Amsterdam in 1642.

Vaillant did not confine his activities to the Amsterdam market. In 1647 and 1675 he paid the admission fee to the Guild of St Luke in Middelburg, probably to enable him to ply his trade there, or perhaps so that he could deal in art. However, it is not known whether he lived in Zeeland or commuted between Amsterdam and Middelburg. He is known to have resided in Germany for a while, where he was active at the court of Prince Rupert of the Rhine in Heidelberg between 1655 and 1658. It was probably there that he first encountered the mezzotint, a new graphic technique which he brought to the Dutch Republic in the mid-1660s with great success. During his time in Germany he made various portrait prints of European aristocrats such as Karl Ludwig, Elector Palatine, his sister Sophia and Emperor Leopold I. Vaillant and his half-brother Bernard attended the latter’s coronation in Frankfurt in 1658. He moved to Paris the following year and remained there until around 1665. Cardinal Mazarin introduced him at the court of Louis XIV, and he made several pastel likenesses of French aristocrats, among them the Sun King himself, his wife Maria Theresa of Spain, the former French queen consort Anne of Austria and her son Philippe d’Orléans.

After these sojourns abroad Vaillant returned to Amsterdam, probably around 1666-67, where he established himself firmly in the market for portraits, drawing his clients mainly from among the city’s rich middle class. Most of his paintings date from the last decade of his life. A document of 1668 states that he was also a picture dealer. Contemporary approval of his work is shown by Von Sandrart’s praise of his mezzotints, but he also wrote that he received it ‘for his good painting of histories and modern scenes, as well as portraits’.⁴ Vaillant was buried in the Waalse Kerk in Amsterdam on 2 September 1677, unmarried and childless.

Vaillant’s painted oeuvre consists of almost 50 works, mainly portraits, but also a few self-portraits, heads, still lifes and genre scenes. His earliest dated picture is the Still Life with a Pheasant of 1652,⁵ but there was already a documented commission for a likeness of Jan Six in 1649.⁶ He painted his last dated work, Portrait of a Young Woman, in 1676.⁷ His own inventions in his mezzotints are mainly portraits and still lifes, but in his copies after northern, Flemish and Italian masters he tackled every genre. Wallerant Vaillant taught his brothers Jacques (1643-1691) and Jean (1627-before 1680), and his half-brother André (1655-1693), all of whom were active as painters and engravers.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024

References
J. von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675: Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. A.R. Peltzer, Munich 1925 (ed. princ. Nuremberg 1675), pp. 264, 300, 351; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, II, Amsterdam 1719, pp. 102-04; J.E. Wessely, Wallerant Vaillant: Verzeichniss seiner Kupferstiche und Schabkunstblätter, Vienna 1865, pp. V-VI; F.J.P. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, Antwerp 1883, pp. 791-92; A. Bredius, ‘Italiaansche schilderijen in 1672, door Amsterdamsche en Haagsche schilders beoordeeld’, Oud Holland 4 (1886), pp. 41-46, esp. p. 42; O. Granberg, ‘Une revue d’art du XVIIe siecle’, ibid., pp. 268-71; A.A. Vorsterman van Oyen, ‘Genealogie van het geslacht Vaillant’, 1892 offprint from Stam- en wapenboek van aanzienlijke Nederlandsche familiën, III, The Hague 1890, pp. 3-7, esp. p. 3; A. Bredius, ‘Het schildersregister van Jan Sysmus, Stads-Doctor van Amsterdam’, Oud Holland 12 (1894), pp. 160-71, esp. p. 166; M. Vandalle, ‘Les frères Vaillant, artistes lillois du XVIIe siècle’, Revue belge d’archéologie et d’histoire de l’art 7 (1937), pp. 341-60, esp. pp. 347-51; Boon in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXIV, Leipzig 1940, pp. 41-42; N. Rogeaux, Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677), graveur à la manière noire, dessinateur à la pierre noire et peintre de portraits, diss., Université Paris IV-Sorbonne 1999, pp. 23-69, 687-730 (documents); N. Rogeaux, ‘Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677): Portraitiste à la pierre noire et au pastel’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts 143 (2001), no. 1595, pp. 251-66

Entry

Portrait of a Young Woman with Three Children has been attributed to Wallerant Vaillant since it was donated to the museum in 1885 by the landscape painter Corstiaan Hendrikus de Swart. It is one of the few horizontal works in the artist’s oeuvre. The half-length figures of the young woman, two boys and the swaddled, sleeping infant are placed fairly close together against a background cut off by a partly opened curtain. The cramped composition is unusual for both Vaillant and seventeenth-century portraiture in general, but the canvas has not been cut down,⁸ as is confirmed by a mezzotint of the same image by Vaillant.⁹ The print has the monogram ‘WV’ at the bottom right, which supports the attribution of the picture to the artist. The structure of the paint layers and the brushwork are so similar to Vaillant’s manner in his signed Portrait of Maria van Oosterwijck of 1671¹⁰ as to make his hand recognizable.

It is difficult to pin down the precise date of this portrait, but given the stylistic similarities it would have been painted when Vaillant was working in Amsterdam after 1666-67.¹¹ More specifically, the young woman’s dress with the lace collar and the cravat of the boy on the right argue for an execution in the late 1660s. The cap he is wearing is found quite frequently in portraits of children.¹² The picture is related in subject to Vaillant’s Woman Sewing with Two Children and Woman with Four Children, which are also assigned to around 1670 on stylistic grounds.¹³ The two boys on the right of the latter work occupy positions similar to those here, with one of them shown in a typical profile view.

Referring to the mezzotint after the Rijksmuseum picture, Joseph Wessely, the pioneer of the systematic study of Vaillant’s prints, stated that the intimate nature of the scene ‘shows [us] the cosiness of Dutch family life’, which led him to interpret the figures in the print as relatives of the artist.¹⁴ In 1891 the boys in the painting were promoted to being Vaillant’s children,¹⁵ but since it is now known that he died without offspring that cannot be true.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

Boon in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXIV, Leipzig 1940, p. 41; A. Czobor, ‘Ein Bildnis André Vaillants von Wallerant Vaillant’, Oud Holland 73 (1958), pp. 242-46, esp. p. 244-45; N. Rogeaux, Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677), graveur à la manière noire, dessinateur à la pierre noire et peintre de portraits, diss., Université Paris IV-Sorbonne 1999, pp. 463-64, no. P25

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 171, no. 1457; 1903, p. 264, no. 2342; 1934, p. 284, no. 2342; 1960, p. 310, no. 2342; 1976, p. 553, no. A 1192

Citation

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024, 'Wallerant Vaillant, Portrait of a Young Woman with Three Children, c. 1668 - c. 1670', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5621

(accessed 24 November 2024 04:13:56).