Virgin and Child with St Anne

1630

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 71.2 cm × width 55.2 cm
frame: height 89 cm × width 72.7 cm
sight size: height 70 cm × width 54 cm

Inscriptions

signature and date, on the chair: D V / hoochstraten. ƒecit 1630

Technical notes

The support consists of three vertically grained oak planks and is bevelled on all sides. The ground layer is light in colour and quite thin. The paint layers were applied smoothly with little visible brushmarking.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 30 September 2004

Condition

Fair. The right join of the panel as seen from the front is open but stable. The joins and a crack running along the entire extent of the right-hand join have been retouched. These retouchings and others in the background have discoloured. The varnish is moderately discoloured. Older varnish residues are also present.

Provenance

...; collection Jonkheer Ruurd Carel van Cammingha (1822-84), Wiarda State, chapel, Goutum (near Leeuwarden), 1877;¹ ? sold when Wiarda State was sold before demolition, 1881;...; sale, Van Pappelendam & Schouten, Amsterdam (F. Muller and C.F. Roos), 11 June 1889 sqq., fl. 140, to the dealer Frederik Muller for Dr Abraham Bredius (1855-1946), The Hague;² by whom donated to the museum, 24 June 1889;³ on loan to the Museum Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder, Amsterdam, since December 1952

Object number: SK-A-1500

Credit line: Gift of A. Bredius, The Hague

The artist

Dirk van Hoogstraten (Antwerp 1596 - Dordrecht 1640)

Houbraken, who was a pupil of Dirk van Hoogstraten’s son Samuel, informs us that Dirk was born in Antwerp in 1596. His father, Jan van Hoogstraten, was recorded as a member of the Antwerp St Luke’s Guild in 1593, but it is not known what his profession was. As Mennonites, the family fled from religious persecution to the northern Netherlands, probably settling in The Hague, where Jan van Hoogstraten died in 1605. Dirk van Hoogstraten trained as a gold and silversmith, which included instruction in drawing and printmaking. According to Houbraken, Dirk was sent to Germany to perfect his craft, but after making the acquaintance of Netherlandish artists there devoted himself to learning the art of painting. Samuel van Hoogstraeten refers to his father’s numerous trips to Italy, the first of which was probably made after his stay in Germany. In 1624, he joined the painters’ guild in Dordrecht, where he married Mayke de Coning, the daughter of a silversmith, in 1626. The couple lived in The Hague between 1628 and 1640, at which point they returned to Dordrecht, most likely because Mayke de Coning’s father was on his deathbed. Dirk van Hoogstraten probably ran his silversmith’s shop during the few months between his father-in-law’s death in July 1640 and his own death on 20 December of the same year.

Dirk van Hoogstraten’s small extant oeuvre includes a number of religious paintings, a painted Self-Portrait, and engravings after works by such diverse artists as Cornelis Massijs and Jacopo Bassano. His earliest dated work is a portrait engraving of 1626 of the Dordrecht minister Johan Becius.⁴ The only other works by him bearing dates are both paintings, the Rijksmuseum’s Virgin and Child with St Anne (shown here) from 1630, and a Virgin and Child with Sts Elizabeth and John⁵ from the following year. Van Hoogstraten was an eclectic artist; his Old Man Reading,⁶ for example, shows a bespectacled figure reminiscent of the elderly apostle in Hendrick ter Brugghen’s Incredulity of St Thomas (SK-A-3908), while the inclusion of a soldier in the background of his drawing, The Triumph of Bacchus,⁷ suggests that Van Hoogstraten had knowledge of Claes Moeyaert’s 1624 painting of this subject.⁸ The registers of the St Luke’s Guild in The Hague record two pupils of Dirk van Hoogstraten: the son of a certain Ossewaert in 1629, and one Nicolaes Kouwenbergh in 1635. His own sons, Samuel (1627-78) and Jan van Hoogstraten (1629/30-54), learned the rudiments of painting from him.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Van Hoogstraeten 1678, p. 118; Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 159-62; Obreen I, 1877-78, p. 203, IV, 1881-82, pp. 8, 30, 34; Veth 1886; Hofstede de Groot in Thieme/Becker XVII, 1924, p. 463; Roscam Abbing 1993, pp. 331-33; Brusati 1995, pp. 16-24

Entry

Also known in English by its German name, Anna Selbdritt, such depictions as the present painting show three generations of the Holy Family. The bunch of grapes Anna offers the Christ Child is a Eucharistic symbol, and refers to Mary as the vine on which the grapes (Christ) grew. The figures are shown in an ordinary domestic interior. The curtain behind Mary, while not seeming out of place, functions as a rather modest cloth of honour. The mirror, with a small broom appended to it, hanging next to the window is probably a reference to Mary’s Immaculate Conception.⁹

The notion, first advanced by Hofstede de Groot, that Van Hoogstraten’s painting was influenced by Italian models is incorrect.¹⁰ The painting was much more probably based on northern Renaissance depictions of the Virgin and Child or Anna Selbdritt, or both, which are typically situated in domestic interiors. Van Hoogstraten seems to have deliberately given his picture an archaic look. The Virgin’s smoothly modelled features and disproportionately large head recall her depictions in 15th- and 16th-century Flemish painting. The myriad angular drapery folds also puts one in mind of earlier northern art. On the other hand, but perhaps unintentionally, the head of the Christ Child has a Rubensesque quality.

The similarities a number of scholars have seen between Dirk van Hoogstraten’s Virgin and Child with St Anne and his son Samuel’s later, ‘classicizing’ work, the Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin in particular, are not readily apparent to the present author.¹¹

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. 150.

Literature

Chong/Wieseman 1992, p. 23; Brusati 1995, p. 21

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 135, no. 1254; 1976, p. 289, no. A 1500; 2007, no. 150

Citation

J. Bikker, 2007, 'Dirk van Hoogstraten, Virgin and Child with St Anne, 1630', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7404

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