Object data
oil on panel
support: height 40.6 cm × width 60.5 cm
Claes Moeyaert
The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel (Genesis 29:10)
c. 1638
Technical notes
The support is a horizontally grained oak panel bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1618. The panel could have been ready for use by 1630, but a date in or after 1635 is more likely. The white, probably chalk, ground layer has been quite thinly applied so that the grain of the wood shows through. The figure of Rachel was painted directly over the landscape, without the use of a reserve. The figure of Jacob was probably reserved, but the reserve is smaller than the actual figure.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 29 August 2002
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 21 September 2005
Condition
Fair. The craquelure is very pronounced and disfiguring in the face of the man next to Jacob. The painting is quite abraded, especially on the left side, in the sky, and Rachel’s face. The blue trousers worn by the figure on the far left have discoloured and now appear brown, probably as the result of the use of smalt.
Provenance
...; sale, F. Kaijser (†) (Frankfurt, Amsterdam) et al. [section E.P. Engel (Zaandam)], Amsterdam (C.F. Roos), 4 December 1888 sqq., no. 68, fl. 300, to J.H. Balfoort, for the Vereniging Rembrandt;1 from the Vereniging Rembrandt, fl. 350, to the museum, January 1889;2 on loan to the Museum Het Rembrandthuis, Amsterdam, since 2004
Object number: SK-A-1485
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Claes Moeyaert (? Durgerdam c. 1591 - Amsterdam 1655)
Claes Moeyaert was was a scion of an old and distinguished Amsterdam family on his mother’s side, and it was from this side that he received both his first and last names. He was probably born in Durgerdam, but as a child was already living in Amsterdam. Although it is not documented, it can be assumed that he received his training, at least in part, from Pieter Lastman. Not only was the latter his principal influence, Lastman lived only a few blocks away from the young Moeyaert and his family when he returned from his trip to Italy between 1605 and 1607. In 1617, Moeyaert married Grietje Claes van Zijl. Both the artist and his wife were Catholic.
His first dated paintings are from 1624. Moeyaert’s extant oeuvre is the largest (about 100 paintings are known) of the pre-Rembrandtists’s, and consists mainly of biblical and mythological paintings. In addition to Lastman’s influence, Jacob Pynas’s landscape style informs Moeyaert’s early work especially. At the end of the 1620s, Moeyaert began adopting Jan Pynas’s elongated figure style and simpler compositions. Rembrandt’s influence is apparent in some of his works from the 1630s, especially the 1639 Calling of St Matthew.3 In the 1640s, and for the rest of his career, Lastman’s example was once again paramount. Although the majority of his oeuvre consists of history paintings, Moeyaert also executed portraits, especially of Catholic dignitaries, and, based on the descriptions in old sale catalogues, possibly pure landscapes as well. He was a very accomplished painter of animals, and often gave them a conspicuous role in his history paintings.
In 1638, he designed tableaux vivants for the triumphal arches erected in Amsterdam in honour of Maria de’ Medici’s visit. His documented involvement with the Amsterdam Playhouse for which he served as a regent, dates to between 1639 and 1641, but probably already began with its establishment in 1637. It was probably through his theatre contacts that he received his only known commission for a group portrait, the 1640 Regents and Regentesses of the Almshouse for Old Men and Women.4 In 1639, Christian IV of Denmark ordered two monumental paintings from Moeyaert. Other commissions included altarpieces for Catholic churches. His last dated paintings are from 1653, two years prior to his death. Moeyaert is mentioned in Theodore Rodenburgh’s 1618 poem written in praise of Amsterdam’s artists. His pupils included the history painter Salomon Koninck (1609-56) and the Italianate landscape painters Nicolaes Berchem (1620-83), Jan Baptist Weenix (1621-c. 1659/61) and Jacob van der Does (1623-73). His younger brother Jan (1603-60/80) probably also trained with him.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Tümpel 1974, pp. 8-34; Dudok van Heel 1976; Dudok van Heel 2006, pp. 269-313
Entry
The subject of Jacob and Rachel meeting at the well was not often depicted in 17th-century art.5 Moeyaert, however, painted it no less than five times. His earliest renderings are two paintings dated 1629, showing relatively large figures in relationship to their landscape settings.6 In another of the same subject, with Gallery Müllenmeister, Solingen in 1969, the figures are somewhat less conspicuous, but a cow, a goat and three sheep are given very prominent positions in the foreground.7 In the Rijksmuseum painting and a closely related one, with Fina Art, Amsterdam, in 1993 (fig. a), the landscape settings are emphasized; the figures, grouped in the left foreground, and the animals are less conspicuous. In all five works, a screen in the form of a building or a hill blocks off one side of the composition.
The extensive landscape on the right in the Rijksmuseum painting is given even more prominence in the work formerly with Fina Art, in which the structure on the left is considerably reduced in size, and the figure of Rachel has been allocated to an inconspicuous position in the middleground. The landscape appears more extensive because much less of it is cast in shadow than in the Rijksmuseum painting. As Moeyaert seems to give progressively more emphasis to the landscape in his five paintings showing Jacob and Rachel, the work formerly with Fina Art probably developed out of the Rijksmuseum painting and not vice versa.8
The compositional changes in the painting formerly with Fina Art were most likely first worked out in a drawing now in the Louvre (fig. b). In this drawing, the structure on the left has been reduced in size, and the shepherd on the far left looks up, albeit not yet directly at the viewer. Moeyaert apparently also gave careful consideration to where Rachel should be placed in the composition of the version formerly with Fina Art; in the drawing, she stands on the far right of the composition, and, therefore, in a different position than in either painting.
Astrid Tümpel’s dating of the work in the Rijksmuseum to around 1638 is based in large part on the wide landscape view.9 The dendrochronology also supports this dating. Further corroborating factors are the almost monochromatic and atmospheric rendering of the landscape and the subordinate role given to local colours. Even factoring in the discolouration of the leftmost shepherd’s trousers, which probably originally had the same purple hue of the trousers worn by the leftmost shepherd in the painting formerly with Fina Art, the colouring in the Rijksmuseum painting is, indeed, much more subdued than in Moeyaert’s earlier works. This muted tonality, the extensive landscape, and the pastoral mood of the present painting set it apart from the majority of Moeyaert’s paintings conceived in a Lastmanian mode.
Jonathan Bikker, 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. 213.
Literature
Tümpel 1974, pp. 105-07, 250, no. 30, with earlier literature; Van de Kamp 1991, p. 39
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 180, no. 1633; 1934, p. 193, no. 1633; 1960, p. 210, no. 1633; 1976, p. 391, no. A 1485; 2007, no. 213
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Nicolaes Moeyaert, The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel (Genesis 29:10), c. 1638', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4610
(accessed 22 November 2024 16:17:09).Figures
fig. a Claes Moeyaert, The Meeting of Jacob and Rachel, c. 1639, c. 1639. Oil on Canvas, 53 x 91 cm. Present whereabouts unknown. Photo: Sotheby's
fig. b Claes Moeyaert, Three Shepherds Pulling the Stone that Covers a Well, c. 1638-39. Red chalk, 217 x 343 mm. Paris, Musée du Louvre, inv. no. 23207, recto. Photo: RMN-Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado