The Sacrifice of Abraham (Genesis 22:10-12)

Pieter Lastman (Amsterdam c. 1583 - Amsterdam 1633)

Pieter Lastman was born in Amsterdam around 1583 into a well-to-do Catholic family. His father, Pieter Segersz, worked as a messenger for the city of Amsterdam and the orphans’ court until he was removed from office after the Alteration of 26 May 1578 because of his religious beliefs. Lastman’s mother, Barbara Jacobsdr, was an official appraiser and second-hand dealer, undoubtedly of art works among other items. Her career and that of one of Lastman’s uncles, who was a goldsmith, probably influenced Lastman’s own choice of career. According to Van Mander, he was apprenticed as a youth to Gerrit Pietersz, a pupil of Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem. Lastman’s earliest dated works, three drawings from 1601 and 1603,² are clearly indebted to Pietersz’s Mannerist style. Van Mander also informs us that Lastman was in Italy at the time he was writing his Schilder-boeck, that is around 1600-03. Financially freed by an inheritance from his father, who had his last will drawn up in June 1602, Lastman probably left for Italy not long thereafter. Houbraken reports that he was in Italy in 1605, and a drawing by Lastman with a view of the Palatine Hill is inscribed ‘Roma 1606’.³ Another drawing by Lastman, a copy of Veronese’s Adoration of the Shepherds in SS. Giovanni e Paolo in Venice, indicates that he also visited that city.⁴ The brightly coloured, small-sized cabinet pictures of Adam Elsheimer, in particular, were influential for Lastman’s multifigured history paintings. Other important influences from his Roman sojourn include Caravaggio, whose naturalistic rendering of figures, and sometimes his compositions too, are echoed in Lastman’s paintings. Lastman also carefully studied the art of Raphael and his school, later translating their monumental frescoes into easel paintings on a much smaller scale.

By March 1607 he had returned to Amsterdam, where he is recorded as one of the buyers at Gillis van Coninxloo’s sale. His first dated painting, an Adoration of the Magi, is from the following year, 1608.⁵ Lastman was the foremost artist of the group of painters who have come to be known as the Pre-Rembrandtists. His history paintings, featuring subjects taken from the Bible, secular history and mythology, a great number of which had never previously been depicted, or if so only in the graphic arts, often formed the starting point for the artists in his immediate circle. His most well-known pupils were Lievens and Rembrandt, who trained with him in 1619 and 1624 respectively. Only two commissions of works from Lastman are known: the design for a window in the Zuiderkerk in Amsterdam from the goldsmiths’ guild, executed in 1611,⁶ and three paintings executed in 1619 for Christian IV of Denmark’s private chapel in Frederiksborg Castle.⁷ Lastman was buried a bachelor in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam on 8 April 1633.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 207v; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 97-102, 214; Dudok van Heel 1975; Dudok van Heel 1991a; Tümpel 1991a; Broos in Turner 1996, XVIII, pp. 817-20; Dudok van Heel 2006, pp. 53-123