Self-Portrait

Entry

When the museum bought this panel in 1903 it was known to be a likeness of Pieter van Asch, but it was believed to be by another, unidentified hand.⁴ It was thought that the artist might be Jan Verkolje, since he had made a mezzotint after a bust-length portrait of Van Asch holding a smaller work of art in his left hand, probably a drawing.⁵ However, since the painting is incompatible with Verkolje’s delicate brushwork, that supposition was soon abandoned. Although it is the only known portrait by Van Asch, the landscape he is pointing to certainly warrants an attribution to him. In 1875 the Rijksmuseum picture reportedly bore Van Asch’s monogram ‘PVA’, traces of which are still visible.⁶

The portrait is not dated, but given the sitter’s age, which must be at least 60, it would have been executed in the 1660s. Although dendrochronology indicated that the panel is much older, having been ready for use as early as 1590, paint samples and infrared photography have not revealed anything that suggests there is another composition beneath the present one.

It became increasingly common from the 1660s onwards for painters to depict themselves in their portraits displaying a work of art for the viewer’s admiration. There are examples by Bartholomeus van der Helst, Frans van Mieris I, Michiel van Musscher and Eglon van der Neer, which Cosimo III de’ Medici began purchasing at the time for his collection of artists’ portraits in Florence.⁷ Wenzel Hollar, too, painted himself holding one of his own prints, and since an etching after that likeness was made by Joannes Meyssens and included in Cornelis de Bie’s Gulden cabinet of 1661,⁸ it is possible that it was Van Asch’s source of inspiration. Both present a work of art with their left hands. Another model could have been the 1667 Self-Portrait by Van der Helst in the Uffizi.⁹ Van der Helst, who like Van Asch is wearing a Japanese robe and night cravat, is seated on an Italian sgabello and is holding up a portrait miniature of his wife. Both artists are twisting around in their chairs and have their heads tilted to one side. Van Asch would not have known this composition from the painted version, as Cosimo III de’ Medici bought it shortly after it was finished, but rather Abraham Bloteling’s reproductive mezzotint.¹⁰ If Van Asch did indeed base his self-portrait on the one by Van der Helst it may date from after 1667.

The picture that Van Asch is displaying possibly never existed as an independent work. At any rate, it has never been traced. Weber has argued persuasively that Vermeer included several of Van Asch’s landscapes in his compositions and suggests that the one Van Asch is holding here is the same as that in the background of Vermeer’s Love Letter, although there it has a vertical format rather than a horizontal one.¹¹

Van Asch’s self-portrait is probably the likeness listed in the probate inventory of Maarten van den Hove, bailiff and sheriff in Rijswijk,¹² who died on 12 June 1684 and may be the same person as the painter recorded in Delft in 1674.¹³ Martinus van der Jagt (1747-1805), who was born in Haarlem but probably worked in Amsterdam, copied the present painting in a watercolour,¹⁴ so it was evidently still in the Netherlands in the second half of the eighteenth century. Van Asch’s self-portrait then disappeared abroad and ended up with Carl Compars Herrmann, a famous German illusionist who travelled throughout Europe and auctioned part of his collection in Vienna in 1875.¹⁵

Richard Harmanni, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements