Portrait of Jan van Egmond (1438-1516), Count of Egmond

Entry

In this portrait and its pendant (SK-A-1548, fig. c), Jan, the first Count of Egmond, and his wife Magdalena van Werdenborgh are depicted at about half-length. The count is wearing a black doublet with brown fur under a fur-lined gown, and a black cap over his grey hair. He holds a golden palm branch and rests his hands in the lower left corner of the composition, as if on the edge of the frame. The palm is a reference to his pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1462-63, when he became a member of the Knights of the Holy Sepulchre.² Jan also wears two gold rings on his left hand, the larger of which bears the arms of Egmond, and the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece around his neck; he was inducted into the order in May 1491. The coat of arms in the upper left of the panel is not of Egmond but of Renesse and is a later addition; the coat of arms in the upper left of Magdalena’s panel, also a later addition, has been overpainted.³ Magdalena herself wears a white headcloth, a white shirt under her long-sleeved black gown, and a gold ring on the little finger of her right hand. She is holding a rosary.

Jan van Egmond, nicknamed ‘Jan the Lame’, was born on 3 April 1438. Upon his father Willem’s death in 1483, he inherited the lordship of Egmond and Baer. In the same year he became Stadholder of Holland and Zeeland, a position he would hold until his death. He was a political supporter of Maximilian of Austria, who appointed him chamberlain in 1477 and elevated him to Count of Egmond in November 1486. Maximilian also encouraged Jan’s marriage to his niece, Countess Magdalena van Werdenborgh, in 1484. Jan died in 1516; Magdalena, 26 years his junior, lived on until 1538.⁴

Hoogewerff first proposed that these portraits, which are executed on paper attached to panel, are copies after a larger set of original panel paintings.⁵ While clearly complementary in composition, they form somewhat unusual pendants, since the two members of a couple are generally depicted facing one another and not, as they are here, facing in the same direction. In a second pair of portraits in New York, painted by the Master of Alkmaar, Jan and Magdalena are indeed turned toward each other and rest their hands on a shared brocaded ledge fig. a, fig. b.⁶ The Metropolitan portraits were identified on the basis of two labelled drawings in the ‘Recueil d’Arras’, which are clearly done after the paintings. Jan and Magdalena are also thought to be portrayed as mourners in a ‘Lamentation of Christ’ (Utrecht, Centraal Museum; panel, 38.5 x 66.1 cm) tentatively attributed to Jan van Scorel and Cornelis Buys and dated 1535-40; De Meyere 1981a, p. 52, no. 10.] Although they are portrayed in the latter images, as in the Rijksmuseum portraits, at just short of half-length against a green background, their attributes are different (Jan holds a scroll, Magdalena a pink), and Magdalena herself, who appears significantly younger in the Metropolitan image, wears entirely different attire. Jan, on the other hand, seems to be approximately the same age in both portraits and is portrayed in both cases wearing a similar hat and fur-lined coat, with the collar of the Order of the Golden Fleece draped broadly over his shoulders. Perhaps the second set of portraits depicting the couple, represented by the paintings in the Rijksmuseum, was commissioned after Jan’s death but prior to Magdalena’s; his portrait might then have been based on the Metropolitan prototype, and hers painted anew. Alternatively, Jan’s portrait may have been copied from a now lost painting depicting knights of the Holy Sepulchre; the golden palm in his hand and the fact that he is curiously facing to the left, as if part of a pilgrimage procession, may suggest as much.⁷ In any case, the advanced age of both figures indicates that the prototypes for the portraits should be dated at the earliest to c. 1510 – Jan’s last years, when he was in his 70s, Magdalena in her late 40s or early 50s – and prior to Magdalena’s death in 1538. However, the Amsterdam portraits themselves may well be later 16th-century copies after the lost originals.
MBa