Portrait of James, 4th Lord Cranstoun (in or after 1643-1685/88)

c. 1663 - c. 1670

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 107 cm × width 87.3 cm

Technical notes

Support The coarse, plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. The tacking edges have been removed at the top and bottom and on the left. The initial sight size of the painting must have been larger, since the picture plane is folded over the current stretcher by approx. 2.8 cm at both the top and bottom, and by approx. 3.8 cm on the left. Shallow cusping is visible on the right.
Preparatory layers The single, light off-white ground extends slightly over the right tacking edge, and up to the current edges of the support at the top and bottom and on the left. It consists of a semi-translucent beige layer containing earth pigments.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends slightly over the right tacking edge, and up to the current edges of the support at the top and bottom and on the left. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light, using a reserve for the figure that has remained partly visible below the shadows of the spread fingers of his left hand. A cross-section shows that the landscape was underpainted in grey (a mixture of black and white pigments). Extensive overpaint makes it difficult to establish whether this was done in other areas as well. The flesh colours were blended smoothly. The facial features were sharply delineated, with markedly light upper and lower eyelids. The back of the brush was used to subtly scratch the border design of the sitter’s cravat in the wet white paint.
Gwen Tauber, 2023

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: G. Tauber, RMA, 14 September 2010
paint samples: G. Tauber, RMA, nos. SK-A-1239/1-2, 14 September 2010
technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 14 September 2010

Condition

Poor. There is a large, old, repaired and repainted hole at centre left, and at least ten old, restored tears are visible overall. Large areas of overpaint are present throughout.

Provenance

…; transferred from the Mauritshuis, The Hague, to the museum, 21 July 1885;¹ on loan to the Dutch embassy, London, 1951-82; on loan to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), Paris, since 1982

Object number: SK-A-1239

The artist

Jan Mijtens (The Hague c. 1613/14 - The Hague 1670)

Jan Mijtens was born in The Hague at the end of 1613 or in January 1614 as the son of David Mijtens and Judith Hennicx. His father was a saddler and a member of the prosperous middle class. The extended family came from Flanders originally and produced numerous painters who remained active in various European countries until the eighteenth century. Jan Mijtens very probably started his apprenticeship with his uncle Isaac Mijtens and trained in all likelihood briefly with the latter’s elder brother, Daniel Mijtens, who returned to The Hague in 1635 after many years in England.

In 1639 Mijtens registered as a master painter with the Guild of St Luke in The Hague. His earliest dated pictures, two group portraits, are from 1638.² In 1642 he married his cousin Anna, the London-born daughter of his uncle Daniel. One of the couple’s children, named Daniel as well, followed in his father’s footsteps. Other pupils of Mijtens were Julius de Geest (1638/39-1699), son of the Frisian portraitist Wybrand de Geest, Nicolaes Lissant (1639/40-after 1696), Gerard de Nijst (dates unknown), Adriaen Stalpert van der Wiele (dates unknown), Pouwels van de Velde (dates unknown), Andries Thijsz de Wit (dates unknown) and Urbanus Talibert van Yperen (c. 1630-in or after 1682). Only the first two left works that have survived.

Mijtens became one of the first members of the newly founded artists’ society Confrerie Pictura in 1656, and he was then immediately elected warden, a post which he held again in 1658-59, and another three times in 1665-69. Although repeatedly nominated as dean he only occupied that position in 1669-70. The Pictura archives also state that he was a captain in the civic guard. Mijtens had certainly been an active member of the White Banner company of the St Sebastian civic guard since 1644. He was then the ensign, and was probably made its commander in 1660. In addition to these functions, he was a church councillor from 1646 to 1654 and a deacon of the Reformed Church.

Mijtens was primarily a portraitist, but he also made some history paintings in the form of biblical scenes and pastorals, and a few genre pieces. He received commissions from the Hague elite and members of the stadholder’s court, as well as from the daughters of Stadholder Frederik Hendrik living in Leeuwarden and Germany. Mijtens’s last dated pictures are the pendants of 1668 of Cornelis Tromp and his wife Margaretha van Raephorst.³ It is known from the sources that even in 1670, the year he died, he was working on portraits for Henriette Catharina, the princess consort of Anhalt-Dessau. After Mijtens’s death on 19 December and burial in the family grave in The Hague’s Grote Kerk on the 24th, one of these likenesses was completed by his son Daniel, who had moved back from Italy shortly before.⁴ Mijtens was reasonably well-off. In 1669 his wealth was assessed at 20,000 guilders for tax purposes. It had not all been earned from painting; some of it came from various legacies.

Richard Harmanni, 2023

References
J. van der Does, ’s-Graven-Hage, met de voornaemste plaetsen en vermaecklijckheden, The Hague 1668, pp. 91-92; 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), p. 350; 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.], IV, Rotterdam 1881-82, passim; ibid., V, 1882-83, pp. 82, 84, 145-48, 153; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, II, Leipzig/Vienna 1910, pp. 211-12; Lundberg in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXV, Leipzig 1931, p. 317; Ekkart in E. Buijsen et al., Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw: Het Hoogsteder Lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag 1600-1700, exh. cat. The Hague (Haags Historisch Museum) 1998-99, pp. 206-10; A.N. Bauer, Jan Mijtens (1613/14-1670): Leben und Werk, Petersberg 2006, pp. 20-28, 129-50 (documents); Bauer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, LXXXIX, Munich/Leipzig 2016, p. 424

Entry

The identity of this man remained a mystery for a long time. Bauer’s research turned up another painting that revealed that the Rijksmuseum picture is a copy after Jan Mijtens’s portrait of the Scottish nobleman James, 4th Lord Cranstoun.⁵ The original was in the collection of Lieutenant-Colonel A.J. Edmonstoune-Cranstoun of Corehouse around the beginning of this century.⁶

James Cranstoun was a son and heir of William, 3rd Lord Cranstoun, who in 1643 married Mary Leslie, the fifth and youngest daughter of the 1st Earl of Leven. Cranstoun Sr sided with the royalists in the English Civil War, and at the Battle of Worcester in 1651, when Charles II vainly fought to regain the throne, he was captured and imprisoned in the Tower of London. His property was confiscated, leaving his wife and children with only a tiny portion of their previous estates to live on.⁷

A lot is known about the father’s life but precious little about the son’s. Given the date of his parents’ wedding James Cranstoun would have been born in or after 1643. He married Mary Don, the daughter of Sir Alexander Don, and died between 1685 and 1688.⁸ His armour, helmet and sword show that he was a military officer, but further details are lacking.

Comparison of this portrait with the prototype shows that the face has been worked up far less and that the rendering of the hair differs from Mijtens’s style. Generally speaking, the execution is far weaker than one is accustomed to with the artist. The depiction of the sky and the rock is uncertain, but by contrast the sash and the armour are very impasted. This is not likely to be an autograph replica, in other words.⁹ Far less copying was done in Mijtens’s studio than in those of Michiel van Mierevelt and Gerard van Honthorst, for example.¹⁰ His portraits were mainly imitated by fellow painters.

Assuming that James Cranstoun was born in 1643 at the earliest he would have to be at least around 20 here, so the original would have been from around 1663. In any event, this canvas in which the sitter has been placed against a rocky outcrop with a view of an idealized landscape on the left ties in with the courtly portraits by Mijtens, chiefly of the 1660s. The prototype was almost certainly executed in the Dutch Republic. Cranstoun’s stay there may have been connected with his military career. It seems likely that the Rijksmuseum copy was made not long after its model.

Richard Harmanni, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

A.N. Bauer, Jan Mijtens (1613/14-1670): Leben und Werk, Petersberg 2006, p. 168, no. A11a

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 189, no. 1704; 1934, p. 204, no. 1704; 1976, p. 407, no. A 1239 (as attributed to Jan Mijtens)

Citation

Richard Harmanni, 2023, 'copy after Jan Mijtens, Portrait of James, 4th Lord Cranstoun (in or after 1643-1685/88), c. 1663 - 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.7236

(accessed 28 December 2024 21:19:59).