Portrait of Aertje Witsen (1599-1652)

1626

Object data

oil on copper

support: height 18.5 cm × width 14.8 cm
outer size: depth 4.3 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature, lower left: D. Bailly fecit
date, lower right: Aº 1626

Technical notes

The support is a copper plate prepared with a greyish ochre ground, which is visible around the rosette. Brushmarking is visible only in the figure’s face.

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder, RMA, 12 October 2004

Condition

Fair. There are small losses throughout in both the ground and the paint layers. The red lake glazing pigment on the rosette is heavily abraded, as are the darker passages in the figure’s face. The varnish is very discoloured.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1874: varnish regenerated
J.A. Hesterman, 1973: retouchings adjusted and revarnished

Provenance

…; from the dealer, P.C. Huybrechts, The Hague, fl. 80, as Portrait of Maria van Reygersberg, to the museum, 29 November 1806¹

Object number: SK-A-16

The artist

David Bailly (Leiden c. 1584/86 - Leiden 1657)

David Bailly was the son of a calligrapher and fencing-master who had emigrated to Leiden from Antwerp. According to the Leiden city chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers – the principal source for information on the artist – Bailly was born in 1584, although later documents indicate that it was 1586. He was first apprenticed in Leiden to the otherwise unknown surgeon and painter Adriaen Verburgh, before becoming Cornelis van der Voort’s pupil in Amsterdam, to which his family had moved in 1602. In the winter of 1608, Bailly embarked on a five year trip, first spending a year in Hamburg and then travelling by way of Frankfurt, Nuremberg, Augsburg and other towns to Rome and Venice. On his return to Leiden, which he reached in 1613, he once again travelled through Germany working for local princely courts, such as that of the Duke of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel. No works have survived from the period before his return to Leiden, where he established himself as a portraitist. From between 1621 and 1633 he executed numerous meticulous, small-scale drawings of Leiden professors and students, as well as fellow artists like Jan Pynas. His earliest signed and dated painting is the Rijksmuseum’s Portrait of Aertje Witsen of 1626 (shown here). After 1633, Bailly apparently concentrated on portrait painting, as there are few drawings from after that date. In addition to Leiden citizens, his sitters included such Amsterdam patricians as Pieter Dircksz Hasselaer and Gerrit Pietersz Schaep. His greatest contribution to 17th-century Dutch art is his combination of portraiture and vanitas still lifes, which reached a high point in his last dated painting, the 1651 Self-Portrait with Vanitas Still Life.²

Relatively late in life, in 1642, Bailly married Agneta van Swanenburgh. In 1648, he was among the founding members of the Leiden Guild of St Luke, becoming its dean the following year. A few months prior to his death in 1657, Bailly took on the lucrative position of steward to the Theological College of the States of Holland and West Friesland. His known pupils were his nephews, the still-life painters Harmen (1612-after 1655) and Pieter van Steenwijck (c. 1615-after 1654).

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Orlers 1641, pp. 371-72; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), p. 190; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 118; Obreen V, 1882-83, pp. 41, 172, 185, 187-89, 196, 242; Moes in Thieme/Becker II, 1908, p. 372; Bruyn 1951, pp. 150-56; De Baar 1973; De Baar 1975; Trauzeddel in Saur VI, 1992, pp. 320-21

Entry

The painting was purchased by the museum in 1806 as a ‘portrait of Maria van Reigersbergh (1589-1653)’, wife of Hugo de Groot. Bruyn was the first scholar to question this identification, but it was not until 2001 that the sitter was recognized to be Aertje Witsen.³ There are two signed drawings from 1625 showing the same woman, one of which carries an inscription on the reverse in a 17th-century hand that reads ‘Jufvrouw van Swieten’ (fig. a). The second drawing has a diameter of 128 mm and was with the dealer Nicolaas Beets in 1934; photo IB, no. 40734.] Aertje (or Aertgen) Witsen was a daughter of the Amsterdam grain merchant and burgomaster Gerrit Jacobsz Witsen (?-1626) and his second wife Grietge Appelman (1563-1601).⁴ In 1617, she married the merchant Cornelis Bicker, who acquired the seigniory of Swieten near Leiden in 1632.⁵ Bailly’s teacher, Cornelis van der Voort, portrayed the young couple at full length the year after their wedding.⁶ There are also two sets of life-size pendant portraits showing Aertje Witsen and Cornelis Bicker at bust length from 1625.⁷ The two identical portraits of Aertje Witsen clearly follow Bailly’s drawings from the same year, and that the male pendants show Cornelis Bicker is supported by secure depictions of him, including Joachim von Sandrart’s 1640 The Company of Captain Cornelis Bicker and Lieutenant Frederick van Banchem Waiting to Welcome Maria de’ Medici, Dowager Queen of France, on her Visit to Amsterdam, September 1638 (SK-C-393) in the Rijksmuseum. Bailly also made a drawing of Cornelis Bicker in 1623, which, however, differs from the two drawings of 1625 showing Aertje Witsen in that the sitter is not in a roundel.⁸ Bicker’s costume and pose differ significantly from the 1625 paintings, which makes it quite conceivable that Bailly drew him again in that year.

Bailly’s Portrait of Aertje Witsen in the Rijksmuseum – the artist’s earliest signed and dated painting – is rather disappointing in comparison with the masterful drawings from the previous year. This can be blamed in part on the painting’s condition, but the execution is also considerably less delicate, and the lace collar hangs in a most improbable manner from the sitter’s left shoulder. While the drawings show Aertje Witsen in a roundel, the present portrait shows her within a painted oval. The portrait on copper is only slightly larger than the two drawings. Oddly, the costumes and hairstyles in the two drawings, the two portraits on panel and the Rijksmuseum painting differ from one another. Those differences are greatest in the present work.

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. 16.

Literature

Bruyn 1951, p. 160 (as Portrait of Johanna de Visscher); Ekkart in Leiden 1976, p. 42, no. S5 (as Portrait of a Woman); dealer cat. Haboldt 2001, p. 40, no. 16

Collection catalogues

1809, p. 5, no. 12 (as Portrait of Maria van Reigersbergh); 1843, p. 5, no. 11 (as Portrait of Maria van Reigersbergen; ‘in good condition’); 1853, p. 1, no. 6 (as Portrait of Maria van Reigersbergh; fl. 400); 1858, p. 5, no. 10 (as Portrait of Maria van Reigersbergh); 1887, p. 6, no. 39 (as Portrait of Maria van Reigersbergh); 1903, p. 37, no. 407 (as Portrait of Maria van Reigersbergh); 1934, p. 35, no. 407 (as Portrait of Maria van Reigersbergh); 1976, p. 95, no. A 16 (as Portrait of a Woman, Thought to be Maria van Reigersbergh); 2007, no. 16

Citation

J. Bikker, 2007, 'David Bailly, Portrait of Aertje Witsen (1599-1652), 1626', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20026532

(accessed 12 December 2025 13:32:38).

Figures

fig. a David Bailly, *Portrait of Aertje Witsen (1599-1652)*, 1625. Pen in brown, 158 x 160 mm. New York, private collection. Photo: Courtesy of B.P. Haboldt & Co