Object data
oil on panel
support: height 75.7 cm × width 109.5 cm
outer size: depth 3 cm (support incl. frame)
Guilliam du Gardijn
Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses in the Rush Basket
c. 1615 - c. 1630
Inscriptions
- signature, bottom centre: G. Du. Gardin
Technical notes
The support consists of four horizontally grained oak planks and is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1598. The panel could have been ready for use by 1609, but a date in or after 1615 is more likely. The colour of the ground is white. The paint layers were applied smoothly, without noticeable brushmarking. The figures, horses and carriage in the right background were sketched in black paint over the dead-colouring. Incising with the butt end of the brush is visible in the bundle of reeds in the right foreground.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 23 October 2004
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 October 2005
Condition
Fair. The joins of the panel have separated and there are three cracks, a small one at centre left, a long one at the centre running through the figures, and another long one at lower right. There are many small losses throughout and numerous small retouchings along the joins, in the sky and the figures’ faces. The varnish has discoloured significantly.
Provenance
...; donated to the museum by Dr Abraham Bredius (1855-1946), The Hague, February 18921
Object number: SK-A-1572
Credit line: Gift of A. Bredius, The Hague
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Guilliam du Gardijn (? Cologne c. 1596/97 - ? Amsterdam in or after 1647)
The year of Guilliam du Gardijn’s birth is based on information contained in the 1618 document recording his first marriage to Jannetjen Ysbrants in Amsterdam, and other documents. It is most often claimed in his modern biographies that he was born in Cologne, but the basis for this supposition is not known. After the death of his first wife, Du Gardijn married Annetje Vermouw in 1639. According to records of the consistory of the Reformed Church in Amsterdam he briefly converted from Catholicism in order to do so. The same records inform us that he subjected his second wife to repeated beatings.
Nothing is known about Du Gardijn’s training, and his known oeuvre is rather small, consisting of only two signed paintings on panel, two on paper, and a number of chalk and wash drawings showing views of Rome, grottoes, and ships in the style of Cornelis van Poelenburch and Bartholomeus Breenbergh. These drawings, and the Italian paper on which they were made, suggest that Du Gardijn travelled to Italy. The German painter Johan Hendrick Roos (1631-85) is recorded as his pupil in 1647. After that date, there are no known documents that mention Du Gardijn. It has sometimes been mistakenly claimed in the literature that he was the father of Karel Dujardin.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Kramm III, 1859, pp. 804-05; De Vries 1885, p. 143; Bredius 1890, pp. 233-34; Von Wurzbach I, 1906, p. 435; Plietzsch in Thieme/Becker X, 1914, p. 102; Roodenburg 1990, pp. 158-59; Ro¨mer in Saur XXX, 2001, p. 421; Schatborn in Amsterdam 2001, p. 74
Entry
This Discovery of Moses is one of only two known paintings by Du Gardijn executed directly on panel.2 Both are history paintings.3 The rather unaccomplished figures in the present painting show the influence of Lastman and Jacob Pynas, as do such motifs as the umbrella in the centre of the composition and the acanthus at the lower right. The landscape has little in common with Du Gardijn’s works on paper that include landscape elements. The short strokes, many of them white highlights on the trees at the right of the picture, however, are also found, and to a much greater degree, in a very strange anthropomorphic landscape executed by Du Gardijn now in Alkmaar.4 This stylistic feature may also have been derived from the work of Jacob Pynas.
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. 76.
Collection catalogues
1903, p. 88, no. 826; 1976, p. 203, no. A 1572; 2007, no. 76
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Guilliam du Gardijn, Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses in the Rush Basket, c. 1615 - c. 1630', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8347
(accessed 25 November 2024 18:30:48).