Portrait of Martinus Alewijn (1634-1684)

Entry

This painting and its pendant of a young girl (SK-A-1311; also fig. a) have been regarded since the early twentieth century as the portraits of Martinus (1634-1665) and Clara Alewijn (1635-1674), the eldest son and daughter of the Amsterdam cloth merchant and dealer in Indonesian goods Abraham Alewijn and Geertruid Hooftman.¹⁰ Both works were auctioned in 1885 by a direct descendant of their father’s elder brother Frederik Dircksz Alewijn (1603-1665).¹¹ The girl was at the time thought to be Anna Alewijn, which is also the name given on a nineteenth-century label on the reverse of that picture. However, in a manuscript annotation in a copy of the sale catalogue she is recorded as Clara Alewijn,¹² and that is how she has been identified in the museum since 1903. The back of the boy’s portrait also bears a label, indicating Martinus’s name and details.¹³ He is said to be 10 years old and Anna 9.

The boy has been correctly recognized, but the girl is probably someone else altogether.¹⁴ Upon the death of the aforementioned Frederik Dircksz Alewijn, who sat himself for Dirck van Santvoort in 1640,¹⁵ an inventory was made up of his collection of pictures, prints and drawings in the house at 182 Herengracht in Amsterdam. It includes ‘2 paintings, likenesses of the children, the one of Martinus Alewijn and the other of cousin De Bye’.¹⁶ This is the only mention of a portrait of Martinus in the list, and since the two are recorded as a pair it is very unlikely that the reference is not to the present works by Van Santvoort. This means that Martinus is accompanied not by his sister Clara but by a first cousin who can be identified as Anna de Bye (1636-1713).¹⁷ She was the eldest daughter of Arent de Bye (1600-1652), Lord of Wayenstein, burgomaster of Zaltbommel and dyke-reeve of the Bommelerwaard in Gelderland,¹⁸ and Margaretha Bicker (1614-?), the sister of Frederik Dircksz Alewijn’s second wife Eva Bicker. Around 1644, when the girl’s portrait must have been painted,¹⁹ Anna de Bye was about 8 years old and that certainly matches her apparent age in the picture. This identification would also explain why the label on the back of that likeness wrongly says that she is Anna Alewijn, which is not all that wide of the mark.²⁰

It has been suggested that there is a connection between these pastoral children’s portraits and the fact that Frederik Dircksz Alewijn built Vredenburgh, his country seat, between 1643 and 1649.²¹ It is not at all clear that both works proclaim a love of the outdoor life, but given their provenance they were indeed probably ordered by him. His eldest son Dirck Alewijn (1644-1687) was baptized on 1 September 1644, and his birth may have been the reason to commission two pastoral portraits of his eldest cousins. One of the same type by Van Santvoort is identified as that of Dirck in the 1885 sale catalogue,²² but Ekkart dated it to 1640-41, so before Dirck was born, and considered Martinus’s younger brother Abraham a suitable candidate.²³

The grounds of the two Rijksmuseum portraits do not match, and there are also differences in technique.²⁴ The girl takes up less of the picture surface than does the boy, which may indicate that the paintings were conceived not so much as companion pieces but were commissioned as two autonomous works. However, the similar dimensions, backgrounds and frames suggest that the artist did regard them as complementary.²⁵ The technical disparities may be due to the fact that the children lived in different places, Martinus Alewijn in Amsterdam and Anna de Bye in Zaltbommel. Interestingly, the composition of the ground in Martinus’s portrait seems identical to that of Van Santvoort’s Directors of the Serge Cloth Industry of 1643,²⁶ which was definitely executed in Amsterdam.

Dirck van Santvoort, Aelbert and Jacob Cuyp and Wybrand de Geest were the main exponents of the pastoral child’s portrait, a genre that was extremely popular for several decades after the late 1630s.²⁷ In these two pictures the artist posed the young sitters against a landscape background (which is far more convincingly related to the foreground in the girl’s likeness). Their colourful, fancy clothing and the allegorical accessories create an Arcadian mood.²⁸ Martinus is holding the almost inevitable shepherd’s staff, and lying in the foreground is a cap with three colourful plumes.²⁹ The horn below it was originally used in hunting, but was increasingly presented as a musical instrument in court circles as the seventeenth century progressed.³⁰ It has been suggested that the dog whose lead Martinus is holding is a reference to the disciplining of the boy, who was taught how to control himself.³¹ The trouble is that it is a greyhound, a classic hunting dog, and in combination with the horn it seems more likely that it should be regarded as a pastoral attribute alluding to the hunt, a pastime associated with the outdoor life enjoyed by the social elite.³² Lambs often serve in pastoral children’s portraits as allusions to childhood innocence, and are also associated with the first ten years of a person’s life.³³ The painting of the girl has the same connotations, with her costly, pink, satin dress, shepherd’s staff and the cord in her hand with which she is making a garland of flowers like the one around her left forearm. Lying on the ground at the front are attributes of Diana, goddess of the hunt, which will also refer to the girl’s status, just as Martinus’s do. Only her coiffure, which is in the latest fashion, rises above the timeless nature of her attire.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements