Portrait of a Man

Entry

These miniature portraits on copper, dated 1627 (shown here) and 1629 (see SK-A-1792), were acquired by the museum at the end of the 19th century. The sitters’ identities are unknown. It can be deduced from the inscription that the man was born in 1587 or 1588, and the woman in 1591 or 1592. Although she is slightly larger than the man, and despite the different dates of the two works, it can be assumed that these two stylistically related little portraits were painted as companion pieces.

There could be various reasons for the difference in dating. R.E.O. Ekkart suggested that they may well have been painted at the same time and that the 1627 portrait is of a man who had already died, so his likeness was antedated.¹ On the evidence of the man’s pose he assumes that the portrait was based on another prototype, such as a detail from a civic guard group portrait. Another possibility is that this is a couple who married between 1627 and 1629, with the husband commissioning the portrait of his new wife to match one that had already been painted of him.

After being acquired by the museum, the unsigned portraits were assigned to Pieter Codde, possibly by Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, who in addition to Codde suggested the Utrecht painter Jacob Duck as a possible candidate.² In their oeuvres, however, there are no securely attributable portraits that are stylistically comparable to these two. The present attribution to Willem Cornelisz Duyster was made by A. Staring in 1960.³ There are indeed points in common with Duyster’s work, particularly the angular figurative vocabulary. The fact that the execution is a little harsh may be because the portraits are on copper. For the time being, then, the attribution to Duyster is being retained. A related portrait, also unsigned, is that of an unidentified man in Twente.⁴

There are a few known group portraits by Duyster, two of which are in the Rijksmuseum (SK-C-514 and SK-A-203), but his paintings of individual sitters are quite rare. One example that is cited is the portrait of the scholar Joseph del Medico that is known from an engraving by Willem Delff, although the inscription below the portrait, ‘Ex pictura W.C. Duyster’, suggests that the small oval portrait is a detail extracted from a larger composition.⁵ That the artist was quite practiced in this genre emerges from the 1642 inventory of Jacob Andriesz Wormbout of Amsterdam, which lists several portraits by Duyster.⁶

Gerdien Wuestman, 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. 66.