Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 79.5 cm × width 64.8 cm
outer size: depth 6.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Abraham de Vries
Self-Portrait
1621
Inscriptions
- signature, date and inscription, upper right: Hanc suam imaginem propria manu / depictam pergula huic iconibus / viventi ut parergon libenter / apposuit A. de Vries Batavus / anno 1621. (The Batavian A. de Vries gladly painted this, his image, with his own hand in the year 1621 as an embellishment for this workshop enlivened with images.)
- inscription, lower left, on the book: DE ARTE PICTURÆ / Optieen docta ab metrica Mathesia / Rhethoruqs ex fonte propriens decore / Gestuum hoc no monumenta ferurars / Historiarum / Podere exacto numitaqs justo / inqs mesura ΓΡΑΦΙΚΗ colorum / linquuia [...] / ponit amana / DE SŸMETRIA ET FLEXURIS PARTIUM MANI CORPORIS LIBRI
Technical notes
The plain-weave canvas support has been lined. Shallow cusping is present on the left and at the bottom. The beige ground layer is visible at the reserve of the collar. The background was painted first, then the face and then the collar. The paint layers were applied rather loosely and economically, with a noticeably schematic rendering of the highlights on the sleeve.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 5 November 2004
Condition
Fair. The collar, cuff, and palette are heavily abraded, and there are numerous discoloured retouchings along the edges of the painting. The varnish is also severely discoloured.
Conservation
- H. Heijdenrijk, 1905: canvas lined
Provenance
...; sale, Mercier (†), Paris (Joullain and Chariot), 16 December 1771 sqq., no. 29 (‘Le Pourtrait de A. de Vries, peint sur toile par lui-même en 1621, hauteur 29 pouces, largeur 22 pouces [78.3 x 59.4 cm]’), 30.12 livres, to the dealer François Joullain (1697-1778), Paris;1...; from Prof Robert Langton Douglas (1864-1951), London, fl. 1,200, to the museum, with support from the Vereniging Rembrandt, 1905
Object number: SK-A-2157
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Abraham de Vries (? The Hague c. 1590/95 - ? The Hague c. 1648/50)
Abraham de Vries’s early life is sketchy, and nothing is known about his training. Although his place of birth is given in the older literature as Katendrecht (near Rotterdam), when he joined the painters’ guild in The Hague in 1644 he paid the low fee natives of the town were charged. In the absence of documents, his date of birth can only be surmised from his dated works, the earliest of which is a landscape drawing from 1613 (RP-T-1888-A-1460).2 According to the inscription on this drawing, it was executed in Lyon. De Vries is documented in Rotterdam in 1617. His earliest dated painting is the 1621 Self-Portrait in the Rijksmuseum (shown here), which was probably also executed outside of the United Provinces as it is signed ‘A. de Vries Batavus’ (A. de Vries, Dutchman). In 1623, he was in Aix-en-Provence, where he portrayed a local magistrate.3 Thanks to the preserved correspondence of the French humanist Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, whom De Vries apparently befriended in Aix, we are well informed of the artist’s – quite frequent – movements during the rest of the 1620s. De Vries was in Aix in 1624, Montpellier and probably Béziers and Toulouse in 1625, Bordeaux in 1626, and Paris in 1627-28. From Paris, he travelled to Antwerp, where a letter of recommendation from Peiresc secured a meeting with Rubens. From documents and, especially, the inscriptions on his paintings it is known that the 1630s and 40s were also quite restless decades for the artist. In the 1630s, he was mostly active in Paris and Antwerp, joining the painters’ guild in the latter city in 1634, but also briefly in Amsterdam where his brother Isaac lived and where he portrayed the Regents of the City Orphanage in 1633.4 Between 1639 and 1643, he was in Rotterdam, after which he settled in The Hague.
In 1648, De Vries made a will, and he probably died in the same or in the following year. Payment for a portrait of Maria Elisabeth II, Marchioness of Bergen, by an artist identified simply as ‘De Vries’ was made in 1649 or 1650 not to the artist himself, but to a certain Sara de Vries. The latter may well have been the daughter of Abraham de Vries’s brother Isaac, who was born in Amsterdam in 1623.5
Except for one history piece, a depiction of St Jerome inspired by Ter Brugghen that was probably painted in France in the 1620s,6 De Vries’s extant oeuvre is composed of portraits. His work is quite varied in style as he constantly absorbed new impulses from the leading artists in the different centres in which he worked.
Among the evidence suggesting that he was held in high regard are two portraits that De Vries executed of his fellow artists, the Antwerp painter Simon de Vos, and the Amsterdam painter Gillis de Hondecoeter.7
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Obreen III, 1880-81, p. 258; V, 1882-83, pp. 77, 102; Ruelens 1882 (letters from Peiresc); coll. cat. Rotterdam 1892, p. 268; Haverkorn van Rijsewijk 1901, p. 61; Hannema 1928, p. 433; Foucart 1980; Van Mosselveld 1982, pp. 68, 70, note 7; Ekkart in coll. cat. Rotterdam 1995, p. 198; Löffler in The Hague 1998, p. 358; Ekkart 2005b
Entry
This striking portrait showing the artist at half-length is Abraham de Vries’s earliest extant painting.
The fact that it is signed ‘A. de Vries Batavus’ (A. de Vries, Dutchman) suggests that it was executed outside the United Provinces, possibly in France, where the artist is documented in 1623. While it has not been possible to identify any direct stylistic models for De Vries’s portrait, the handling is significantly broader than in his later work, especially that of the 1640s.
The Latin inscriptions at upper right and on the book on proportion at bottom left, also in Latin, emphasize the artist’s erudition. In 1628, the great French humanist Peiresc wrote a couple of letters to his friend, the Parisian historian Pierre Dupuy in which he discussed De Vries’s temperament and qualities.8 The Dutch artist, Peiresc reported to his friend, modelled his ‘actions et habitudes’ on Rubens’s example, and was ‘tout plein de cognaissance de bon nombre de livres des plus nécessaires à sa profession’. The title on the right page of the open book may be a corruption of the Latin title of the first two volumes of Dürer’s book on proportion: De symmetria partium in rectis formis humanorum.9 Some of the words in the title may have been taken from the title of volumes three and four: De varietate figuram et flexuris partium ac gestibus imaginum libri duo.10
De Vries presents himself not only as a learned artist, but also in the act of painting, holding a palette and paint brushes. The pair of compasses on the table at the bottom of the composition are probably a direct reference to Dürer’s book on proportion, the original German title of which is Underweysung der Messung, mit dem Zirckel und richtscheyt, in Linien Ebnen und gantzen Corporen. Intertwined with the compasses on the table are scales for measuring pigment, which probably also alludes to the qualities of balance and harmony in Dürer’s proportion system.11
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. 330.
Literature
Raupp 1984, p. 41
Collection catalogues
1907, pp. 374-75, no. 2600a; 1934, p. 310, no. 2600a; 1976, p. 591, no. A 2157; 2007, no. 330
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Abraham de Vries, Self-Portrait, 1621', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6494
(accessed 13 November 2024 08:07:36).