Portrait of a Man

1647

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 60.5 cm × width 45 cm
outer size: depth 3 cm (support incl. SK-L-2332)

Inscriptions

signature and date, centre right (A and B ligated): AB V Schoor 1647

Technical notes

Support The oval panel consists of two vertically grained oak planks (approx. 27 and 18 cm), approx. 1 cm thick. Small chip losses along the edges of the picture plane indicate that the panel was cut into an oval shape after the paint had dried. The reverse is bevelled at the bottom and on the right, and has numerous pinholes along the vertical axis which served as centre points for overlapping, circular scribe marks, used in the creation of the oval format. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1628. The panel could have been ready for use by 1639, but a date in or after 1645 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, smooth, off-white ground does not extend over the edges of the support.
Underdrawing Infrared reflectography revealed delicate lines of underdrawing, describing the eyes, eyebrows, nose, mouth, jaw, neckline and facial hair. A few lines indicating the beard are also faintly visible with the naked eye.
Paint layers The paint does not extend over the edges of the support. The face was executed first, then the costume and collar, leaving a reserve for the largest part of the beard. A cool underpaint, possibly part of an undermodelling, appears to have been left visible as the shadow below the ear and in the rounding of the forehead at top right. The detailing in the clothing was applied very thinly. The hair, moustache and beard were built up by placing different tones over one another. The overall thin paints were applied rapidly and wet in wet.
Laurent Sozzani (additions Willem de Ridder), 2024

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: L. Sozzani / W. de Ridder, RMA, 18 May 1998
paint samples: L. Sozzani, RMA, nos. SK-A-1424/1-2, 8 July 2008
technical report: L. Sozzani / N. Baadj, RMA, 22 July 2008
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 28 February 2011
infrared reflectography: G. de Vivo / I. van Vliet, RMA, 31 October 2022

Condition

Fair. The open join has been reinforced with three pieces of stiff cardboard glued and tacked over it.

Provenance

…; donated by Abraham Willet (1825-1888), Amsterdam, to the museum, 1887¹

Object number: SK-A-1424

Credit line: Gift of A. Willet, Amsterdam

The artist

Aelbert Jansz van der Schoor (Utrecht in or before 1603 - ? Utrecht in or after 1672)

The earliest archival reference to Aelbert van der Schoor, the son of a coppersmith from Utrecht, indicates that he had reached adulthood in 1621. Under local law one was considered an adult at the age of 18, so he must have been born in or before 1603. There is no mention of him in Utrecht between 1621 and 1641, when a deed places him in the city once again. Based on his earliest known work, a 1642 portrait of a woman pointing at a skull,² Van der Schoor presumably began painting around this date. He may have pursued a different profession prior to that. Although his name is absent from guild records and there is no information on who his teacher was, it has been suggested that he was a pupil of Abraham Bloemaert based on similarities in style and working method. Van der Schoor’s tendency to sign paintings with numerous variations of his name resulted in his being misidentified as Abraham van der Schoor for many years. It was only after the discovery of his full signature, ‘Ailbart van der Schoor’, on a will drawn up in Utrecht in 1648 that his true identity was revealed. In 1652 Van der Schoor was listed with Elisabeth de Blom of Dordrecht in the marriage register of that city. The union was annulled before it was consummated, though, because of the bride’s fear that he was only after her money. After a two-year court battle, Van der Schoor was awarded financial compensation for his claim that she was in breach of contract. In 1666, he was sent to a house of correction in Utrecht and shortly thereafter to a local asylum. His whereabouts after 31 September 1672, the date of the last payment made to that institution on his behalf, are unknown.

Van der Schoor’s oeuvre, which currently consists of about 30 works, most of which are signed, comprises portraits, Caravaggesque musical companies and histories, and fish and vanitas still lifes. His genre and history paintings, characterized by vibrant colours and animated, sharply lit figures, are indebted both stylistically and compositionally to such Utrecht artists as Abraham Bloemaert, Dirck van Baburen and Jan Gerritsz van Bronckhorst, among others. The fact that the only two sitters who have been identified in his portraits were not from Utrecht implies that he had established a reputation outside his native city. Van der Schoor turned from figure to still-life painting in the late 1650s and focused almost exclusively on fish and vanitas scenes from then on. This shift in subject matter may have been prompted by the death in 1653 of Jan de Bont, the foremost practitioner of the fish still life in Utrecht. Van der Schoor’s last dated picture is a vanitas still life with a bust of 1662.³

Nadia Baadj, 2024

References
A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, II, Leipzig/Vienna 1910, p. 583; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXX, Leipzig 1936, p. 257; P. van den Brink, ‘Aelbert Jansz. van der Schoor, een Utrechts schilder en zijn werk’, Oud Holland 108 (1994), pp. 37-58; M.J. Bok, ‘Het leven van de schilder Aelbert van der Schoor (Utrecht voor 1603?-Utrecht? na 1672)’, Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1998, pp. 169-77; P. van den Brink, ‘Aelbert Jansz. van der Schoor, een Utrechts schilder en zijn werk’, Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1998, pp. 139-68; A. van der Willigen and F.G. Meijer, A Dictionary of Dutch and Flemish Still-Life Painters Working in Oils, 1525-1725, Leiden 2003, pp. 178-79; Heise in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, CII, Munich/Leipzig 2019, p. 181

Entry

All extant dated portraits by Aelbert van der Schoor, including this bust-length one of a man with a fiery red beard, were painted during the first half of his career, between 1642 and 1651. The costume, close-cropped hair and full beard are remarkable among Van der Schoor’s likenesses and raise questions about the sitter’s identity. He is wearing a golilla, a stiff linen collar which was popular at the Spanish court from the 1590s onward.⁴ His long beard, a feature sometimes associated with conservative clergymen, is also significant. A debate about hair length preoccupied the Netherlands in the 1640s. While fashionable men tended to have longer hair and short, pointed beards, Protestant ministers often sported long, full beards in order to garner respect and distinguish themselves from clean-shaven monks and priests.⁵ Identification of the present sitter is complicated by the fact that it is unclear where Van der Schoor was working in 1647, when this portrait was made. In that same year he painted a likeness of Jan Jansz van Loosen, a native of Enkhuizen and then a director of the Dutch West India Company (WIC).⁶ There is no record of Van der Schoor in the Enkhuizen archives, so he may have depicted Van Loosen elsewhere, possibly while the latter was on a business trip.⁷ Van der Schoor’s signature on a will one year later, in 1648, confirms that he was once again in Utrecht. The clear lighting as well as the tightly rendered features reflect the influence of Jan van Bijlert, the leading portraitist in Utrecht at the time.

The present work and the likeness of Van Loosen stand out as being Van der Schoor’s only ones on panel, a type of support he rarely used for other subjects.⁸ Although an oval format is typical of Van der Schoor’s portraits, in other instances, such as the picture of Van Loosen, he painted the oval in the centre of a rectangular panel in order to create an illusionistic frame.

Based on this, as well as on the fact that there is no paint on the edges of the panel and small chip losses occur along the perimeter of the picture plane, it is likely that the support’s oval shape was cut down from a rectangular format after the work was finished.⁹ The Utrecht artist Gerard van Honthorst frequently rendered his sitters, especially noble ones, at bust length in painted ovals and Van der Schoor may have looked to this precedent.

Nadia Baadj, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

P. van den Brink, ‘Aelbert Jansz. van der Schoor, een Utrechts schilder en zijn werk’, Oud Holland 108 (1994), pp. 37-58, esp. p. 50, no. 3; P. van den Brink, ‘Aelbert Jansz. van der Schoor, een Utrechts schilder en zijn werk’, Jaarboek Oud-Utrecht 1998, pp. 139-68, esp. p. 155, no. 3

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 243, no. 2166; 1976, p. 507, no. A 1424

Citation

Nadia Baadj, 2024, 'Aelbert Jansz. van der Schoor, Portrait of a Man, 1647', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5421

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