Object data
oil on panel
support: height 109 cm × width 80.5 cm
outer size: depth 5.5 cm (support incl. frame)
Paulus Moreelse
Portrait of Maria van Utrecht (c. 1552/53-1629)
1615
Inscriptions
- signature, date and inscription, centre left: Æta. 63 Anº 1615 / PMo fe
Technical notes
The support, which consists of three vertically grained planks, has been thinned down. The ground is a yellow ochre colour. The paint layers show little brushmarking.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: M. van de Laar, RMA, 25 March 2003
Condition
Poor. Although stable, the panel joins have separated. There are a great many discoloured, poorly executed retouchings. The varnish is also somewhat discoloured.
Conservation
- J.A. Hesterman, 1906: treatment unknown
Provenance
...; collection Pieter Oets (1720-90), Amsterdam;1...; sale, Jacob Odon (†), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 9 June 1784, no. 37, as Michiel van Mierevelt (‘1615. op paneel, hoog 42, breed 31 duim [108 x 79.7 cm]. Het Pourtrait van Maria van Utrecht, Huisvrouw van Jan van Oldenbarneveld, oud zynde 63 Jaaren, deeze Vrouw is in de smaak van dien tyd pragtig in het zwart gekleed, het Bovenkleed met Sabelbont gevoerd, zy is gezeeten in een leuningstoel, waar op zy met de regter hand rust, en de linker is op haar Schoot geplaatst [...].NB. Dit is hetzelfde Pourtrait [...] dat berustende was by den Konstschilder den Heer P Oets [...].’);...; ? collection Jeronimo de Bosch III (1740-1811), Amsterdam;2...; fl. 1,946, as Michiel van Miereveld, with Portrait of Hugo de Groot by van Mierevelt (SK-A-581), to the museum, 22 June 18033
Object number: SK-A-275
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Paulus Moreelse (Utrecht c. 1571 - Utrecht 1638)
De Bie was the first author to give Moreelse’s year of birth; the artist’s baptismal record has not come down to us. His father, Jan Jansz Moreelse, was a cooper from Louvain. According to his 17th- and 18th-century biographers, Moreelse studied for two years with Michiel van Mierevelt, probably in Delft, and then spent a long period in Italy, where he received numerous portrait commissions in Rome. None of the paintings executed by Moreelse in Italy are known today. He returned to Utrecht by 1596, when he reportedly joined the saddlers’ guild, to which painters also belonged. In 1602 Moreelse married Antonia van Wintershoven. Because the ceremony took place in the town hall of Utrecht, Moreelse would not have been a member of the Reformed Church at this point. Later, however, he did join that congregation. His first dated painting, a Portrait of a Man is also from 1602.4 In the spring of 1611, Moreelse was elected dean of the saddlers’ guild and in September of the same year he became the first dean of the newly founded Guild of St Luke. He held this post again in 1612, 1615 and 1619. Twenty-eight pupils are recorded as having trained with Moreelse from 1611 on, more than with any other guild member. Together with Abraham Bloemaert, Moreelse was also one of the principal teachers at the drawing academy set up in Utrecht some time after the painters’ guild gained independence. Among Moreelse’s pupils were Dirck van Baburen (1594/95-1624), Pieter Portengen (c. 1612-43) and Jan ter Borch (?-1676). Two of his sons, Johan (after 1602-34) and Benjamin (before 1629-51), also became painters, and one of his daughters is reported to have assisted Moreelse with the execution of a portrait.
Moreelse was chiefly active as a portrait painter. In addition to his many portraits of Utrecht’s leading citizens, he received commissions from court circles, such as the 1621 Portrait of Sophia Hedwig, Countess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, as Caritas, with her Children.5 Moreelse’s 1616 Officers and Other Civic Guardsmen of the IIIrd District of Amsterdam, under the Command of Captain Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh and Lieutenant Nanningh Florisz Cloeck (SK-C-623) is the only civic guard piece by a Utrecht painter to have survived. Moreelse also painted histories and genre pieces, and is credited with introducing the single-figure shepherdess into Dutch painting. His activities as an architect include a plan for enlarging Utrecht (executed posthumously in 1663) and the design of the Catherijnepoort (1621-25; destroyed), one of the town gates. After having supported Prince Maurits’s dismissal of Utrecht’s town council in 1618, Moreelse was given a seat on the new town council, which he occupied until his death. He also served as churchwarden of the Buurkerk, headman of the civic guard, an alderman, and chief treasurer of Utrecht. Paulus Moreelse died on 6 March 1638 and was buried in the Buurkerk.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 280v; De Bie 1661, p. 131; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 171, 178; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 49; Hoevenaar 1778, p. 9; Swillens 1926; De Jonge 1938, pp. 1-7, 139-53 (documents); Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 322-25; Bok in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 311-12; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, p. 386; Domela Nieuwenhuis 2000; Domela Nieuwenhuis 2001, I, pp. 13-60, 203-50 (documents)
Entry
The earliest mention of the sitter’s identity is found on a drawing of 1760 by Reinier Vinkeles after Moreelse’s painting.6 Maria van Utrecht was the wife of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547-1619), whom she married in 1575.
The portrait is one of four by Moreelse showing older women seated in an armchair.7 Moreelse’s earliest extant portrait of this type is dated 1610.8 In both works, a sense of space has been created by the inclusion of a pilaster set on a plinth, a standard motif in Moreelse’s knee-length female portraits executed between 1610 and 1622.9 Also characteristic of Moreelse’s production in this period is the sfumato handling of the sitter’s face and the rather large, fleshy hands.10
De Jonge suggested that a portrait lost in a fire at Museum Boymans in 1864 might have been a pendant to Moreelse’s portrait of Maria van Utrecht.11 The Museum Boymans portrait was identified in a 1849 catalogue as showing Johan van Oldenbarnevelt. Domela Nieuwenhuis has rejected this hypothesis, pointing out that the measurements given in the 1849 catalogue for the Museum Boymans portrait (74 x 59 cm) do not correspond with those of the Rijksmuseum’s Portrait of Maria van Utrecht.12 He also questions the identification of the sitter in the 1849 Museum Boymans catalogue as a number of portraits of old men were incorrectly assumed to show Johan van Oldenbarnevelt in the 19th century.
Den Tex proposed that a 1617 portrait by Van Mierevelt of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt was painted as a pendant to the present painting.13 It is not certain which painting Den Tex had in mind. Presumably it was a three-quarter length one dated 1616 showing Johan van Oldenbarnevelt standing at a table.14 Den Tex’s suggestion seems unlikely, not only because the two portraits are by different artists, but because the support of the 1616 Portrait of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt is canvas, while the present painting is on panel. The Portrait of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt is also much larger than Moreelse’s Portrait of Maria van Utrecht.15
It is possible that the Portrait of Maria van Utrecht did not have a pendant. At any rate, it is not listed with a companion piece in the catalogue of Odon’s 1784 sale. A half-length copy of the present painting was sold at auction in The Hague in 1970.16
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. 215.
Literature
De Jonge 1938, p. 82, no. 42; Den Tex III, 1966, p. 526; Domela Nieuwenhuis 2001, I, p. 82, II, pp. 376-78, no. SAP26, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1809, p. 49, no. 212; 1843, p. 42, no. 216 (‘the panel glued, and the flesh has suffered’); 1853, p. 19, no. 190 (fl. 500); 1858, p. 95, no. 211; 1880, pp. 219-20, no. 240; 1887, p. 116, no. 978; 1903, p. 184, no. 1659; 1934, p. 198, no. 1659; 1976, p. 397, no. A 275; 2007, no. 215
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Paulus Moreelse, Portrait of Maria van Utrecht (c. 1552/53-1629), 1615', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4646
(accessed 10 November 2024 08:38:28).