A Scholar in his Study

c. 1642 - c. 1650

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 41.1 cm × width 34.2 cm
outersize: depth 6 cm (support incl. SK-L-6240)

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained, quarter-sawn oak plank is approx. 1.2 cm thick on the left and approx. 0.5 cm on the right. The reverse is bevelled at the top and bottom and on the right, and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1631. The panel could have been ready for use by 1642, but a date in or after 1648 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, off-white ground extends up to the edges of the support. It consists of white pigment particles (some of them coarse) with a minute addition of fine brown and black pigment particles.
Underdrawing Infrared reflectography and infrared photography revealed an extensive underdrawing in a dry medium. Following the principles of one-point perspective, the space with all architectural elements and parts of the furniture was constructed with a grid of ruler-drawn horizontal and diagonal lines. The central vanishing point is located in the scholar’s beard. Loose, scribbled lines define the shapes of the books on the table, the bag hanging on the wall near the window and the scholar’s cloak. The stool in the foreground was planned further to the left than finally painted. The beginnings of a spiral staircase are visible in the top left corner, but it was not executed.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was laid out in translucent browns, leaving the window and figure in reserve. This undermodelling has remained visible throughout, most notably in the transitions between the walls and the ceiling. The face was executed with thin wet-in-wet layers and from dark to light. It was reserved in the black clothes, which were modelled wet in wet with grey paint on top of a black base. Grey scumbling was used for the different shades of the walls and the ceiling. The ceiling beams, the floor and the tomes in the bookcase were further built up with grey and a darker brown. The paint surface is smooth, with small impasted brushstrokes in the highlights. The illuminated pages on the table and the light parts of the window were executed last.
Anna Krekeler, 2023

Scientific examination and reports

infrared reflectography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 19 September 2008
infrared photography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 24 June 2009
paint samples: A. Krekeler, RMA, nos. SK-A-23/1-2, 24 June 2009
technical report: A. Krekeler, RMA, 24 June 2009
infrared reflectography: A. Krekeler, RMA, 24 August 2009
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 27 February 2011

Condition

Fair. The reverse has a vertical crack, approx. 6 cm long, in the lower right corner. The blue of the tablecloth now appears greyish and the dark clothes have white protrusions throughout. The varnish is extremely thick, has yellowed and saturates poorly.

Provenance

…; ? sale, Catharina Petronilla Josepha de Blondel de Lillers (?-1776), dowager of Baron Ferdinand Philippe Antoine de Boneem (1703-1773), Brussels (F. de Roy), 15 July 1776, no. 19, as Cornelis Bega (‘Un Philosophe avec autres décorations très-bien exécuté par Corneille Bega. B[ois], Haut 15 pouc., larg. 11 pouc. [40.5 x 30 cm].’), fr. 54, to F. de Roy;…; from P.J. Thijs, as Cornelis Bega, fl. 60, to Gerrit van der Pot (1732-1807), Lord of Groeneveld, Rotterdam, 20 September 1799;¹ his sale, Rotterdam (Gebr. Van Ryp), 6 June 1808 sqq., no. 9, as Cornelis Bega (‘Hoog 15¼, en breed 12¾ duim [39 x 32.8 cm]. Pnl. Een Oud Man in eene overdenkende houding, in zijne Studeerkamer zittende, met aangenaam bijwerk. Bevallig verlicht; uitvoerig en krachtig geschilderd.’), fl. 195, to A.A. Stratenus, for the museum²

Object number: SK-A-23

The artist

Willem de Poorter (? Haarlem c. 1607/08 - ? Haarlem in or after 1648)

Willem de Poorter was reported to be 30 years old in a notarized document dated 12 June 1638, so he was probably born in 1607 or 1608, and most likely in Haarlem since his father, Pieter de Poorter, an immigrant from Moorsele in Flanders, had settled there by 1601. The artist himself is first recorded in the city in 1630. Although two of his paintings were sold at an auction in Haarlem in 1631, and his earliest extant picture is dated 1633,³ it was only in 1634 that he was listed as a master in the local Guild of St Luke. Pieter Casteleyn (1618-1676) was registered as his pupil the following year. Two others, Pieter Abrams Poorter (dates unknown) – probably a relative – and Claes Coenraets (dates unknown), began their apprenticeships with him in 1643.

De Poorter’s oeuvre consists of small history pieces and still lifes with armour. It is not known with whom he trained, but the principal influences on his histories were Pieter Lastman and Rembrandt. A drawing after the latter’s 1636 Susanna and the Elders bears De Poorter’s signature.⁴ A drawn copy after Rembrandt’s 1630 Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem and a painted one of his 1631 Simeon in the Temple have also been convincingly attributed to him.⁵ As both those pictures probably date from the time when Rembrandt was still living in Leiden, and the influence of other of his early works is discernible in De Poorter’s oeuvre, the Haarlem artist may well have received instruction from him there. This hypothesis also explains why his still lifes were executed in the fijnschilder manner of Rembrandt’s Leiden pupil Gerrit Dou. The aforementioned drawing after Rembrandt’s Susanna and the Elders indicates that De Poorter, whose presence in Amsterdam is recorded on at least one occasion in 1637, remained in contact with Rembrandt after the latter had moved there.

It is usually stated in the literature that De Poorter became sheriff of Wijk, a town near Heusden in the province of North Brabant, in 1642. This notion is based on notarized documents from Amsterdam that were discovered by Bredius, but is nevertheless mistaken. The patronymic of the Willem de Poorter mentioned in those records and elsewhere was not Pietersz, as with the present artist. The person referred to is Willem Willemsz de Poorter, son of Willem Dircksz de Poorter (1543-before 1607), a burgomaster of Wijk.⁶

The place and year of De Poorter’s death are not known. His last dated painting is from 1647.⁷ No documentary trace of him is found after 7 April 1648, when he was living in Haarlem.

Jonathan Bikker, 2023

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, III, Amsterdam 1721, p. 61; A. van der Willigen, Geschiedkundige aanteekeningen over Haarlemsche schilders en andere beoefenaren van de beeldende kunsten, voorafgegaan door eene korte geschiedenis van het schilders- of St. Lucas Gild aldaar, Haarlem 1866, p. 178; Juynboll in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXVII, Leipzig 1933, pp. 258-59; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lucasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1798, I, Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, p. 137; ibid., II, 1980, pp. 420, 433, 535, 598, 1040; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, IV, Landau/Pfalz 1989, pp. 2385-89; Broos in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XXV, New York 1996, pp. 230-31; J.G.C.A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, p. 369; A.E. Waiboer, ‘Willem de Poorter: Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt Pupil’, Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art 5 (2013), no. 2 (https://jhna.org/articles/willem-de-poorter-rembrandt-not-rembrandt-pupil/); Wegener in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XCVI, Munich/Leipzig 2017, pp. 325-26

Entry

This Scholar in his Study was thought to be a Cornelis Bega from at least 1799, when it was bought by Gerrit van der Pot, until 1887, when the picture was given to Salomon Koninck in the Rijksmuseum’s collection catalogue of that year.⁸ It was not until more than a century later that Sumowski challenged the latter attribution and correctly recognized the painting as a late work by Willem de Poorter.⁹ The setting and the solitary figure’s position are indeed very close to those in another depiction of a scholar which was also convincingly assigned to De Poorter by Sumowski,¹⁰ as well as to those in the artist’s signed Man Weighing Gold now in Raleigh.¹¹ The latter panel and the one discussed here have the same rendering and bulkiness of the black cloak, while the figure type, with his large, pointy beak of a nose, appears in other works by De Poorter, such as a signed vanitas allegory.¹² The Rijksmuseum scene also suffers from the perspective problem endemic to much of De Poorter’s oeuvre. His figures appear either too small, or, as in the present case, too large in relation to the objects surrounding them. In addition, the books and sheets of paper closest to this greybeard are undersized when compared to the open volume lying in front of them, as well as to the tomes on the shelves on the rear wall and the books and globe forming a repoussoir closest to the picture plane. The door in the right background is far too low relative to the room. Finally, the way in which the books droop over each other and the edge of the table, resembling wet rags more than paper, is consistent with the approach in De Poorter’s other Scholar in his Study and Man Weighing Gold. The Rijksmuseum panel probably dates from late in the artist’s oeuvre, when the scale of his figures became larger and his technique looser.

A popular subject in seventeenth-century Dutch painting, the iconography of the scholar in his study is rooted in medieval depictions of St Jerome, one of the four Fathers of the Church, in his cell.¹³ This origin for the theme is apparent in Rembrandt’s 1642 etching of St Jerome in a Dark Chamber,¹⁴ which has the same design as two pictures of secular scholars produced by his followers.¹⁵ A panel dated 1631 of a Scholar in a Vaulted Chamber in Stockholm is considered to be a copy of a lost prototype by Rembrandt himself.¹⁶ A striking motif in Rembrandt’s etching and the two closely related paintings is the spiral staircase, which seems to serve as a metaphor for the complex thought processes of the scholar. Examination with infrared reflectography has revealed that De Poorter – assuming the present work is indeed by him – initially planned such a staircase for his composition as well.¹⁷

Also like Rembrandt’s etching, and a number of other depictions of scholars in their studies, De Poorter’s figure rests his head on his hand. This pose was associated with melancholy, an imbalance in one of the so-called humours that especially affected creative and learned individuals.¹⁸ Among the attributes assigned to this type of person in Cesare Ripa’s influential Iconologia is an open book, because ‘the Melancholic is very inclined to study, and seeks to progress in it, fleeing the company of others’.¹⁹ At the end of the emblem Ripa quotes the description in the medieval Regimen sanitatis Salernitanium, which could just as easily apply to the scholar in De Poorter’s painting: ‘The heavy-hearted person, bowed down with care, full of sighs, full of thought, with downcast eyes, full of sleeplessness, of deliberations, full of envy, full of fright and pain, full of falsehood and full of fear, tends usually to see with a gloomy gaze.’²⁰ The greybeard’s affliction is communicated in the present work not only by the symbolic pose but also through the monochrome palette and chiaroscuro.

Jonathan Bikker, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, VI, Landau/Pfalz 1994, p. 3740, no. 2425

Collection catalogues

1880, p. 46, no. 21 (as Cornelis Bega); 1887, p. 95, no. 792 (as Salomon Koninck); 1903, p. 151, no. 1375 (as Salomon Koninck); 1934, p. 157, no. 1375 (as Salomon Koninck); 1976, p. 326, no. A 23 (as Salomon Koninck)

Citation

Jonathan Bikker, 2023, 'attributed to Willem de Poorter, A Scholar in his Study, c. 1642 - c. 1650', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.12066

(accessed 23 November 2024 10:17:07).