Object data
oil on panel
support: height 55.6 cm × width 45.3 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy (attributed to)
Portrait of Margriet Benningh (1565-1641)
c. 1629 - c. 1640
Technical notes
The panel consists of three vertically grained oak panels. It is only bevelled at the top and must originally have been larger. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1603. The panel could have been ready for use by 1614, but a date in or after 1620 is more likely. The ground is white. The paint layers are thin. Undermodelling in transparent brown, green and pink was used intentionally for contours and soft shadows. Individual brushstrokes just visible in the mid-tones were used to soften the contrast between shadows and highlights yet the contrasts remain somewhat schematic and harsh.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 11 May 2005
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 10 June 2005
Condition
Fair. A knot in the panel has become slightly visible in the sitter’s ruff. The retouching of the join on the right has discoloured badly, as has the varnish, creating a splotchy, yellowed appearance.
Provenance
? Commissioned by or for the sitter; ? her stepson, Dirck Hasselaer (1581-1645), Amsterdam; ? his daughter, Aegje Hasselaer (1617-64), Amsterdam; ? her daughter, Brechje Hooft (1640-1721), Amsterdam; ? her son, Jan van de Poll (1668-1745), Amsterdam; ? his son, Harmen Hendrik van de Poll (1697-1772), Amsterdam; ? his wife, Margaretha Trip (1699-1778); her son, Jan van de Poll (1721-1801), The Hague;1 his grandson, Jan van de Poll (1777-1858), Amsterdam, 1802 (stored with other family portraits in his aunt’s house, Herengracht 479 in Amsterdam); his son, Jan Stanislaus Robert van de Poll (1805-88), Arnhem (stored with 25 other family portraits in his sister-in-law’s house, Herengracht 450 in Amsterdam); by whom donated to the museum together with 34 other family portraits, as anonymous, November 18852
Object number: SK-A-1245
Credit line: Gift of Jonkheer J.S.R. van de Poll, Arnhem
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy (Amsterdam 1588 - Amsterdam 1650/56)
Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy was born in Amsterdam in 1588 as the eldest son of the armorial stonemason Elias Claesz Pickenoy and his wife Heijltje Laurens s’Jonge, both of whom were born in Antwerp. In 1621 the painter married Levina Bouwens. In 1629 and 1634 Pickenoy was warden of the Guild of St Luke. He died between May 1650 and October 1656. Pickenoy was a successful artist, with an oeuvre numbering dozens of individual portraits, as well as groups of regents and civic guardsmen. A very different part of his output consists of several paintings of mythological and religious subjects, including a Christ and the Woman Taken in Adultery.3
Stylistic evidence suggests that he was trained by Cornelis van der Voort, the most influential portrait painter in Amsterdam in the 1610s and 20s. Pickenoy’s earliest known work is The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Sebastiaen Egbertsz de Vrij of 1619.4 Despite competition from artists like Rembrandt and Thomas de Keyser, Pickenoy was the leading portraitist in Amsterdam in the 1630s – a position he lost in the 1640s to Bartholomeus van der Helst, who may have been his pupil. In that period, though, he did make a few very large civic guard pieces, among them Officers and Other Civic Guardsmen of the IVth District of Amsterdam, under the Command of Captain Jan Claesz van Vlooswijck and Lieutenant Gerrit Hudde of 1642 (SK-C-1177).
Everhard Korthals Altes, 2007
References
Six 1886, pp. 81-108; Lelienfeld in Thieme/Becker X, 1914, p. 458; Dudok van Heel 1985, pp. 152-60; Ekkart in Amsterdam 1993, p. 313; Briels 1997, p. 368
Entry
This portrait of Margriet Benningh (1565-1641), the second wife of Pieter Dircksz Hasselaer (1554-1616), was originally larger. It must have been the same size as its companion piece, the Portrait of Pieter Dircksz Hasselaer (see SK-A-1249).5 Hasselaer was an Amsterdam councillor and civic magistrate, and was one of the founders of the Compagnie van Verre (Company of Distant Lands) in 1594.6
Van Dam van Isselt knew of three versions of the pendants.7 The pair now in Muiderslot (Muiden) seem to have been the original versions.8 The main argument behind this assumption is the fact that, unlike the Rijksmuseum version, the portrait of Margriet Benningh in Muiderslot is dated 1629 and gives the sitter’s age as 64. It also probably has its original dimensions of 69.5 x 54 cm. The Rijksmuseum’s Portrait of Pieter Dircksz Hasselaer may be a copy after a work that is attributed to Cornelis van der Voort in Muiderslot.9
The attribution of the two Rijksmuseum portraits is extremely difficult. They appear to have been painted by different artists. It is likely that Pickenoy made the female portrait, since there is a certain similarity to other likenesses by him, such as that of Maria Joachimsdr Swartenhont of 1627 (SK-A-699). The modelling, however, is a little harsher. It may be an autograph repetition.
It is remarkable, though, that Margriet’s husband had been dead for over 13 years in 1629, which means that Hasselaer’s portrait must have been made earlier than his wife’s. What is equally interesting is that the provenance of the two portraits in the Rijksmuseum and of those in Muiderslot can be traced back without a break to the 17th-century patrons.10
Everhard Korthals Altes, 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. 239.
Literature
Van Dam van Isselt 1919, pp. 179-84
Collection catalogues
1887, p. 43, no. 340 (as Portrait of a Woman); 1976, p. 219, no. A 1245; 2007, no. 239
Citation
E. Korthals Altes, 2007, 'attributed to Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy, Portrait of Margriet Benningh (1565-1641), c. 1629 - c. 1640', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8378
(accessed 21 September 2024 08:33:14).