Portrait of Johan van Ceters (1602-29)

Entry

According to the inscription on the back of the panel, this is a portrait of Johan van Ceters.¹ The coat of arms at top left is that of the Van Ceters or Van Citters family.² Johan, the son of Aernout van Ceters, Lord van Gapinge³ and his third wife Anna van der Hooghe, was studying in Orléans in the 1620s. His stay in France was not without incident, as emerges from various letters and other documents of 1626-27.⁴ The young Van Ceters got into financial difficulties, and was eventually imprisoned in Orléans. He must have returned to Middelburg shortly after his release in 1627, and on 7 September of that year he signed an acknowledgement of a debt to his brother-in-law Johan van der Stringen, who had paid off his creditors. Van Ceters died two years later aged 27.

The portrait shows him standing, with a small book in his right hand and a glove in his left hand. This three-quarter length, which is dated 1622, is one of the weakest of the family portraits in the De Witte van Citters Bequest. The figure gives a flat and lifeless impression, the pose is wooden, and the sitter’s right arm is in an impossible position. There is a great contrast between the execution of this work and that of the portrait of Johan van Ceters’s younger sister Mertijntje (SK-A-2076), which dates from the following year. R.E.O. Ekkart has rightly remarked that the present work may be a posthumous portrait painted after a prototype from 1622.⁵ The clothing must have been modified in the process, for the lace collar is of a type that only became fashionable in the 1630s.⁶

In 2003, scientific examination revealed that this portrait was painted over another one. This was confirmed by X-radiographs, in which the first sitter’s ruff and cuffs showed up clearly. It is not clear whether the underlying portrait is of a woman or a man. On the evidence of details of the clothing such as the ruff, the hidden portrait was painted in the second or third decade of the 17th century. The male portrait on top of it is probably of a much later date, and would have been commissioned by a descendant to fill a gap in the family series. The historically inaccurate collar lends weight to this theory, all the more so in that the supple, falling collar was painted as if it was of the standing type, as Patricia Wardle has pointed out.⁷ The painter’s identity is unknown.

A copy of this portrait by Willem Stad (1873-1959) is in Middelburg.⁸

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. 445.