Portrait of a Young Woman Holding a Flower

c. 1668 - c. 1670

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 87 cm × width 71.5 cm
outer size: depth 7.5 cm (support incl. SK-L-1988)

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. The tacking edges at the top and on the left and right have been preserved, though severely damaged and covered with wax, the one at the bottom has been removed. No cusping is present. Judging by the crack pattern parallel to the edges the bars of the original strainer were approx. 4 cm wide. The initial sight size of the painting must have been larger, since the picture plane is folded over the current stretcher by approx. 3 cm at the bottom and by approx. 1 cm on the right.
Preparatory layers The double, smooth ground extends up to the edges of the canvas at the top and on the left and right, and up to the current bottom edge of the canvas. The first, solid, bright orange-red layer is followed by a dark brownish layer containing black and earth pigments and some white pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the canvas at the top and on the left and right, and up to the current bottom edge of the canvas. The composition was built up from the back to the front, without the use of reserves, and from dark to light. First the sitter and the pillar seem to have been blocked in with white paint and a sketch in greyish tones on top, a small area of which was left uncovered in the bottom right part of the dress. The paint was predominantly applied in opaque colours, wet in wet, with the exception of a red glaze over the flower. The face, hands and flower were delicately rendered, but the dress was done quite cursorily, leaving rather crude brushmarks, especially in the finishing touches. The paint layer is quite smooth, with textured loose brushstrokes only in the flesh tones and dress, adding to the modelling. A few accents, details and dark contours were placed lastly. X-radiography revealed an unidentified form to the left of the sitter’s right hand, which was also broader at first and painted higher up. The left arm was initially positioned lower down and the index finger was slightly longer, as is visible to the naked eye. An area of red, apparently opaque paint shows through the white of the dress from just below the flower down to the bottom edge.
Willem de Ridder, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

paint samples: W. de Ridder, RMA, nos. SK-A-1254/1-2, 4 March 2008
technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 4 March 2008
infrared photography: W. de Ridder, RMA, 5 March 2008
X-radiography: J. van der Brugge-Mulder, RMA, nos. SK-A-1254/A1-2, B1-2, C1-2, 21 October 2019

Condition

Good. The red lake of the flower has turned transparent and is partially abraded. There is an old, repaired tear in the upper right-hand part of the bodice and minor discoloured retouching throughout. The varnish is slightly discoloured and has an uneven gloss.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1887: canvas lined
M. Zeldenrust, 1979: complete restoration
B. Hartwieg, 1979: complete restoration

Provenance

…; collection Jan van de Poll (1721-1801), Amsterdam;¹ his grandson, Jan van de Poll (1777-1858), Amsterdam, 1802 (stored with other family portraits in his aunt’s house, 479 Herengracht, Amsterdam); his son, Jan Stanislaus Robert van de Poll (1805-1888), Arnhem (stored with 25 other family portraits in his sister-in-law’s house, 450 Herengracht, Amsterdam); by whom donated to the museum, with 34 other family portraits, November 1885²

Object number: SK-A-1254

Credit line: Gift of Jonkheer J.S.R. van de Poll, 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’.³ 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 1652,⁴ but there was already a documented commission for a likeness of Jan Six in 1649.⁵ He painted his last dated work, Portrait of a Young Woman, in 1676.⁶ 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

This unsigned painting was first attributed to Wallerant Vaillant in the Rijksmuseum’s collection catalogue of 1903, and that has never been challenged since. It is related to several other portraits of women from after 1666-67, when Vaillant was once again working in Amsterdam. The sitters, some young and evidently all from well-to-do families, are holding flowers, possibly as an allusion to purity or innocence.⁷ The vertical grey strip on the left in the present picture indicates a column. Showing through the white dress below the bloom is a patch of bright red which appears to be the preparation for a larger area, possibly of more flowers.⁸

This group of portraits fits within a general trend, embroidering on Anthony van Dyck’s style by artists such as Nicolaes Maes, Jan Mijtens, Michiel van Musscher and Caspar Netscher.⁹ The Rijksmuseum canvas can be dated to around 1668-70 on the basis of the clothing and style.¹⁰ The young woman is wearing her hair en coiffure à la Sévigné, which became fashionable in the 1660s. In addition, her silk dress with its low neckline and fastenings at the front can be dated to the end of that decade.¹¹ As with Vaillant’s likeness of Maria van Oosterwijck,¹² the paint layers were applied wet in wet over an initial sketch. The execution of the drapery folds is similarly loose and sometimes crude, with clearly visible brushstrokes defining the forms, but with little impasto. The flesh tones in the face and hands are more delicately rendered and opaquely worked up than the dress, as is the case in a 1671 Portrait of a Young Woman by the artist in a private collection.¹³ The soft modelling of the bodies and the avoidance of marked chiaroscuro effects are typical of Vaillant’s manner in his Amsterdam portraits.

The Rijksmuseum work was donated to the museum in 1885 together with 34 other portraits, many of them of identified sitters, by Jan Stanislaus Robert van de Poll, so it is very possible that this young woman could be discovered among his seventeenth-century ancestors.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

A. Czobor, ‘Ein Bildnis André Vaillants von Wallerant Vaillant’, Oud Holland 73 (1958), pp. 242-46, esp. p. 244; 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. 219, 462-63, no. P24

Collection catalogues

1887, p. 75, no. 626 (as Dutch School); 1903, p. 264, no. 2343; 1934, p. 284, no. 2343; 1976, p. 553, no. A 1254

Citation

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024, 'Wallerant Vaillant, Portrait of a Young Woman Holding a Flower, 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.5623

(accessed 13 November 2024 01:43:54).