Portrait of Suzanna Moor (1608-57)

Entry

This full-length portrait of Suzanna Moor was painted as the companion piece to that of her second husband, Laurens Reael, to whom she was married from 1629 until his death in 1637 (SK-A-3741).⁷ Like him, she is shown standing beside a table covered with a red cloth. A curtain hangs on the right, and on the left there is a view into a room at the back, which is not quite aligned with the one in her husband’s portrait.

It is not known who painted this likeness. Cornelis van der Voort, who painted Reael, is not a candidate. Not only do the two works differ in style, but he died several years before the couple married.⁸ Moor’s portrait is well below the standard of Reael’s.⁹ Other candidates who have been put forward, such as Jan van Ravesteyn¹⁰ and Thomas de Keyser,¹¹ are equally unacceptable.

In 1988, Ekkart associated the painting with a portrait by an unknown Dutch artist that was auctioned in 1951.¹² It is a half-length of the same woman wearing the same clothes and jewellery, with only the left hand being in a slightly different position. The question is whether the Rijksmuseum painting is a modified copy after the one sold in 1951 or after another work, but it is very likely that it is a copy, given the schematic nature of the face and stiffness in the ruff and folds of the draperies. It is not inconceivable that it was painted long after Suzanna Moor’s death.

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. 428.