Portrait of Cornelis Samuelsz van Esch (1594/95-1656)

Entry

Loughman was able to identify the sitters in this rare series of seven small portraits on copper from the label, probably from a 19th-century French sale, on the back of the frame of the woman’s portrait, which reads ‘No. 100 1-7 Famille Harley de Dordrecht’.³ Mention is made of seven octagonal portraits showing Cornelis van Esch, his wife and five children in the 1676 Dordrecht inventory drawn up after the death of Dr Johan de Jongh. De Jongh was married to Cornelis Samuelsz van Esch’s eldest daughter, Cornelia, and their daughter, Cunira de Jongh, married Robert Hartley. The series apparently remained in the Hartley family until the 19th century, by which time it was thought to show members of that family.

The date, 1632, is still discernible on the Portrait of Cornelis Samuelsz van Esch (shown here) and the Portrait of Cornelia Cornelisdr van Esch (SK-A-1747-C). As Cornelis Samuelsz van Esch married Josina de Carpentier (SK-A-1747-B) on 24 May 1622, it is possible that it was the couple’s tenth wedding anniversary that prompted the commission of the series.⁴ The ages and sexes of their five children correspond with those in the portraits: Cornelia, Maria (15 October 1625, SK-A-1747-D), Josina (2 June 1627, SK-A-1747-E), Samuel (29 March 1629, SK-A-1747-F) and Cornelis (12 November 1630, SK-A-1747-G). Although the two youngest children in the portraits wear skirts, their white falling collars indicate that they are boys rather than girls.⁵ The older child is also shown holding a kolf stick and ball (kolf was a forerunner of hockey and golf), which often, although not exclusively, appear in portraits of boys.⁶ The age of only one of the children, Maria, is still legible, and she was indeed seven years old in 1632.

Born in Dordrecht in 1601, Josina de Carpentier was the eldest daughter of Johan de Carpentier, a metal merchant who was born in England to Flemish refugee parents. Her mother, Maria Hellincx, came from Liège. Josina de Carpentier died in childbirth on 24 February 1634, that is to say within two years of these portraits having been painted. In 1637, her widower married the well-placed Helena van den Honert. While Cornelis Samuelsz van Esch’s occupation at the time the present series was executed is not known, between 1634 and 1644 he was provost of the mint of Holland in Dordrecht, and between 1638 and 1656, the year of his death, he was secretary to the Dordrecht municipal treasury. He also served the town council as councillor (1639 and 1640) and magistrate (1643-44 and 1649-50).

At some point, it must have been thought that Michiel van Mierevelt was responsible for this exquisitely painted series, as his name is scratched into the back of the portrait of Cornelia van Esch. Daniel Franken Dzn, who bequeathed the portraits to the museum in 1898, considered Moreelse to be their author, which attribution was quite rightly rejected by De Jonge in 1938.⁷ The portraits were subsequently assigned to Van Poelenburch in the erroneous belief that two stylistically related portraits on copper, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, show that artist and his wife, and were painted by him (figs. a-b). Horace Walpole, who had inherited the paintings from his father, had Thomas Chambers engrave the man’s portrait as a self-portrait of Van Poelenburch for the second volume of his Anecdotes, published in 1762. As De Bruyn Kops has argued, while the V&A and Rijksmuseum portraits were quite probably executed by the same artist, there is no basis for the attribution to Van Poelenburch.⁸

More recently, Loughman, acting on the advice of Albert Blankert, attributed the series to Paulus Lesire (1611-in or after 1656), arguing that a Dordrecht painter must have been responsible for its execution, and comparing it with Lesire’s signed Portrait of a Young Woman of 1639 in the Bredius Museum.⁹ Blankert and Loughman’s attribution was – quite deservedly – short-lived, as Bruyn was quick to criticize it by pointing out the vastly inferior quality of Lesire’s authenticated portrait.¹⁰ Bruyn, however, proposed an equally unsatisfactory solution, first of all by questioning the grounds on which the 18th-century attribution of the V&A Portrait of a Man to Van Poelenburch was abandoned.¹¹ The author seems to answer his own question when he writes: ‘It is true that most signed Poelenburch portraits, nearly all of them belonging to the Fürstenberg collection, Schloss Herdringen, lack the combination of minute detail and atmospheric effect that is characteristic of the eight portraits mentioned’ (i.e. the Rijksmuseum series and the V&A Portrait of a Man).¹² It is only in Van Poelenburch’s 1648 Portrait of Jan Both that Bruyn could find a reminder of the ‘subtle treatment’ of the latter paintings. As the small copper plates at Schloss Herdringen all date to around 1650, Bruyn suggested that Van Poelenburch may have changed his portrait style from the detailed rendering of the Rijksmuseum ovals to the ‘somewhat vacuous courtly elegance’ of the later works. However, it becomes apparent that this was not the case when Van Poelenburch’s pendant portraits of Jean Pellicorne (1597-after 1653) and Susanna van Collen (1607-60) in Baltimore are taken into consideration.¹³ Given the youthful appearance of Pellicorne and his wife, these portraits were probably executed in the second half of the 1620s, possibly in celebration of the couple’s wedding in 1626.¹⁴ There is no appreciable difference in style between the Baltimore portraits and those by Van Poelenburch in Schloss Herdringen from about 25 years later, and the notion that the Utrecht artist may have briefly worked in a much more meticulous mode seems unlikely.

In support of his argument, Bruyn also assigned one portrait in Schloss Herdringen, possibly showing Berend van den Bongart, and the V&A Portrait of a Woman to an assistant in Van Poelenburch’s studio, based on the ‘stylized’ facial features, the slanting eyes in particular.¹⁵ Leaving aside the similar facial features – which need not necessarily be the result of stylization – the Schloss Herdringen portrait, especially the costume, is rendered much more loosely than the V&A woman. Accordingly, neither the attribution to Lesire of the present series, nor the reattribution to Van Poelenburch, is convincing.

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. 435.