Portrait of a Young Man as a Hunter

1635

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 109 cm × width 88 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, date and inscription, lower left (A and E ligated): AETATI SVI. 23 / ANº. 1635. / P. Danckerse fecit

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been lined twice, with both lining canvases still present. All tacking edges have been preserved, though trimmed. Cusping is visible on all sides, but only vaguely at the bottom and on the right.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends up to the tacking edges. The first, red layer consists of red earth pigments with a few yellowish and some black pigment particles. The second, grey ground contains white pigment with some carbon black and yellow pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the tacking edges. Reserves were used in the background for the figure, and in the jacket for the cape and the belt, the contours of which now slightly overlap the jacket. A pentimento is present in the figure’s right arm, where the jacket was painted over the green sleeve. The clothing was blocked in with a mid-tone and worked up with freely applied wet-in-wet zigzag highlights and shadows, as is clearly visible in the jacket. The ground was left exposed between the fingers of the figure’s right hand and shows through in the shadowed areas of the flesh colours. Brushstrokes are visible overall, more so in the light-coloured opaque paints. Some open brushwork is apparent in the background and the trousers.
Ige Verslype, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: I. Verslype, RMA, 7 December 2009
paint samples: I. Verslype, RMA, nos. SK-A-1593/1-2, 7 December 2009
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 7 December 2009

Condition

Fair. There are matte retouchings throughout, but they are most apparent vertically along the centre of the painting in the face, jacket and belt. Discoloured retouching is clearly visible in the figure’s right arm. The varnish saturates moderately.

Conservation

T. Thompson, 1978: complete restoration

Provenance

…; from an unknown seller, fl. 300, to the Ministry of the Interior, 31 December 1892; transferred to the museum, 1893¹

Object number: SK-A-1593

The artist

Pieter Danckerts de Rij (Amsterdam c. 1605 - Amsterdam 1660)

Pieter Danckerts de Rij was a son of Cornelis Danckerts de Rij (1561-1634) and Oede Seyl. His father was the city mason of Amsterdam and executed major designs by Hendrick de Keyser in Amsterdam, such as the Stock Exchange, the Haarlemmerpoort city gate, and the Westerkerk and Zuiderkerk. The registration of Pieter’s baptism has never been found, but it is generally assumed that he was born in 1605, since he is stated to be the third child in the will that his parents made on 17 August 1624, and their second one, a daughter named Agniet, was baptized on 7 February 1604.

The artist is noted mainly as the court painter to Wladyslaw IV of Poland, who was also Grand Duke of Lithuania and as such ruler of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Danckerts was active in both Warsaw and Vilnius. In the first city he made a series of 22 likenesses of the so-called Jagiellonian family as part of the decorations of the Marble Hall in the king’s castle. Very little of the royal commissions has survived. The 1645 equestrian portrait of Queen Cecilia Renata of Poland, born a Habsburg archduchess, is now known only from an engraving by Willem Hondius.² It is not documented when Danckerts returned to the Dutch Republic, merely that he was buried in the Westerkerk in Amsterdam on 15 December 1660. The probate inventory of Claes Calkoen, Danckerts’s brother-in-law and sole heir, lists several works by the painter, among them likenesses of the king and queen of Poland.

Danckerts’s earliest dated picture is a 1634 portrait of his father Cornelis. The companion piece of his mother does not bear the year of execution, but will have been made around the same time.³ Given the dating of the likeness of Adam Kazanowski, the Polish court chamberlain, Danckerts was already working in Poland by 1638.⁴ Although the attire and pose of the sitter were modified to fit the country’s tradition, the painting is quite clearly from the Dutch artist’s hand. Most of his Polish portraits are only known from engravings after them. He also produced history scenes, one of which was a Bathsheba of 1657,⁵ which is also his last dated picture.

Richard Harmanni, 2022

References
C. de Bie, Het gulden cabinet van de edel vrij schilder const, inhoudende den lof vande vermarste schilders, architecte, beldthowers ende plaetsnijders van deze eeuw, Antwerp 1662, pp. 288-90; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, Amsterdam 1718, p. 250; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, I, Leipzig/Vienna 1906, p. 378; Teding van Berkhout in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, VIII, Leipzig 1913, pp. 343-44: W. Hofman, ‘De natte brug van Danckerts’, Maandblad Amstelodamum 57 (1970), pp. 84-89, esp. pp. 87-89; J. Lileyko, A Companion Guide to the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Warsaw 1980, pp. 40-41; Bernatowicz in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XXIV, Munich/Leipzig 2000, p. 80

Entry

The horn and spear indicate that this young man is a hunter. His rather bouffant hair and the blue drapery billowing out behind him suggest that he is running past the painter. The statement of his age identifies this as a portrait, and the fanciful costume means that it has to be classified as a portrait historié. The most common type within that genre was the pastoral scene with the sitter in the role of a shepherd or shepherdess, certainly as far as half to three-quarter length figures were concerned,⁶ and depictions of Diana, which were particularly popular for illustrating the subject of the chase.⁷ Younger children were also represented as hunters, but one rarely sees adult men in that guise. Since the attributes are here limited to the horn and the spear it is difficult to say whether the young man is alluding to a specific hero from classical literature. In any event, his colourful garb rules out Adonis or Apollo, because those gods wore far less clothing.

Blankert suggested that a portrait of a hunter by Ferdinand Bol in Ranger’s House in Greenwich might be an allusion to Aeneas and that the pendant would have to be a Dido, because a combination with a Diana would be inconceivable.⁸ Bol’s figure, who is also fully dressed, is recognizable as such from his game bag, falcon and two hounds, but he has no spear.⁹ It is not known whether this youth by Pieter Danckerts de Rij ever had a companion piece, but his pose does not rule it out.

This picture is an early work, like the portraits of his parents of 1634.¹⁰ Here, though, Danckerts is more assured and displays great sensitivity in the modelling. The imitation of the fabrics of the hunter’s costume is excellent. In other words, he was already highly skilled in an early stage of his career. For an Amsterdam artist both the use of colour and the subject display a remarkably close relationship to the Utrecht school, so it seems very possible that he trained with a painter from that city.

Richard Harmanni, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Collection catalogues

1903, p. 80, no. 761; 1934, p. 79, no. 761; 1976, p. 187, no. A 1593

Citation

Richard Harmanni, 2022, 'Pieter Danckerts de Rij, Portrait of a Young Man as a Hunter, 1635', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8265

(accessed 21 September 2024 11:51:49).