Portrait of a Woman, probably Sophia Anna van Pipenpoy (c. 1618-70), Countess of Schellart

Entry

This monumental portrait dated 1659 of a distinguished lady forms a pair with that of a man from the same year that is now in the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Lille (fig. a). Wassenbergh thought that the woman was Princess Albertina Agnes of Orange-Nassau,³ an identification that was rightly rejected by Van Kretschmar on the grounds that the sitter is considerably older than Albertina, who was 25 years old in 1659.⁴ Moreover, the husband in Lille bears no resemblance to Willem Frederik of Nassau-Dietz, Albertina’s husband.⁵ The couple in the portraits have since remained anonymous.

However, the woman’s features, the date 1659, and the marriage symbolism incorporated in both portraits, enable this married couple to be identified with a high degree of certainty as Sophia Anna van Pipenpoy (c. 1618-70) and Johan Albrecht (1619-98), Count of Schellart. In the first place, the woman’s face closely resembles that in the portrait of Sophia, of which Wybrand de Geest made two versions in 1654 and 1655.⁶ The similarities are in the mouth, the cleft chin, and the high forehead. Above all, though, the remarkably long, narrow nose is an important indication that these are one and the same woman. According to the archives, Sophia married Johan Albrecht of Schellart in 1659, the year in which the pendants were painted.⁷ Unfortunately, the two known portraits of Schellart provide no leads as to physical resemblance, since the earliest one shows him at the age of 11,⁸ while the other one belongs to a series of small, stereotype portraits by Cornelis van Poelenburch which have hardly any individual traits at all.⁹ The fact that the monumental pendants in Amsterdam and Lille were made to mark the couple’s marriage is suggested by the many roses in the woman’s portrait and the flowering orange-tree in the male counterpart.¹⁰ That the couple were able to afford such ambitious paintings is also clear from the considerable number of large loans they secured in the year of their marriage.¹¹ In addition, the two of them do not look young, which matches the biographical data on Van Pipenpoy and Schellart, who were 41 and 40 years old respectively in 1659.

There is quite a lot of biographical information on Sophia Anna van Pipenpoy. She was the only child of Eraert van Pipenpoy (c. 1576-1638) and Jel van Liauckama (c. 1585-1650).¹² She married Wijtze van Cammingha (1629-52), who was murdered in 1652 in Eppegem, near Mechelen.¹³ As already noted, Sophia married her second husband, Johan Albrecht, Count of Schellart, in 1659.¹⁴ The declarations made to the court suggest that the couple were Catholics, which is borne out by the fact that Sophia was prosecuted in 1668-69 for affording protection to a Roman Catholic priest.¹⁵ It was undoubtedly because of this second marriage that Sophia had her will drawn up that same year, in which she stated that, should she die childless, her husband was to have the usufruct of all her goods and chattels.¹⁶ She was Schellart’s third wife.¹⁷ Their marriage was dissolved by the Court of Friesland on 25 November 1662 because of Schellart’s adultery.¹⁸ Sophia revoked her will that year, and made the children of Catharina van Liauckama her heirs.¹⁹ Sophia continued living at Liauckama State in Sexbierum until her death on 18 November 1670. She never had any children.

There are another five known portraits of Sophia Anna van Pipenpoy in addition to this one. In 1628, at the age of 10, she was painted full-length by L.J. Woutersin.²⁰ Then there is a three-quarter length of c. 1640 that is attributed to Wybrand de Geest.²¹ Finally, there are the two versions of the half-length mentioned above, both of them signed by De Geest.²² Sophia evidently liked having her portrait painted, and her reputation for vanity lives on to this day, for it was recently said of a dolled-up woman in Sexbierum that she ‘looks just like Mrs Pipenpoy’.²³ What is more interesting is that De Geest was evidently her favourite portraitist, perhaps partly because he too was a Frisian Catholic.

De Vries has rightly remarked that the monumental portrait in the Rijksmuseum is an impressive piece of work, and that it demonstrates that the standard of De Geest’s art did not fall off in his later years, as Wassenbergh had suggested.²⁴ Van Kretschmar described De Geest as a masterly imitator of the type of full-length, standing portrait developed by Anthony van Dyck,²⁵ but he could also have been inspired by the portraits produced by Ferdinand Bol, Bartholomeus van der Helst and other Amsterdam painters.²⁶

Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 85.