Allegory of the Revival of the Dutch Herring Fishery after the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67)

c. 1667 - c. 1670

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 114.3 cm × width 163.2 cm
outer size: depth 5 cm (support incl. SK-L-6095)

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been removed. Shallow cusping is present at the top and on the left.
Preparatory layers The rather thick double ground extends up to the current edges of the canvas. The first layer is white and contains fine as well as coarse white pigment particles. The second layer is a dark grey and consists of brown, a few orange, some finely ground black and coarse white pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the current edges of the canvas. The composition was built up from the back to the front. Reserves were left for the trees and bushes, which were filled with a monochrome green underpaint. A second layer, describing the details of the foliage, extends beyond the reserves over the paint of the sky. The figures were mostly placed on top of the background, wet in wet, from dark to light. The colour transitions are not very subtle and the slightly impasted highlights are rather uniform.
Erika Smeenk-Metz, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder / H. van Eendenburg, RMA, 3 March 1998
paint samples: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, nos. SK-A-3829/1-2, 29 April 2010
technical report: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 29 April 2010

Condition

Poor. There is a deformation in the centre of the canvas, weave imprint, flattened impasto and wrinkled paint (in the sky), probably all due to lining. The paint layer is abraded. There are coarse craquelures throughout with small fragments of paint chipped off in the corners, and many large areas of paint loss, mostly in the greens of the trees, some of them filled and retouched, others only retouched. Discoloured retouchings are visible throughout. The sky has become transparent and has extensive areas of overpaint, many of which are discoloured and abraded. The thick, irregular varnish has yellowed and there are residues of an old, discoloured varnish.

Provenance

…; ? collection Jonkheer Johan Cornelis de Jonge (1793-1853), The Hague;¹ ? his son, Jan Karel Jacob de Jonge (1828-1880), The Hague;² his wife, Jonkvrouw Elizabeth Adriana de Jonge, née de Kock (1845-1932), The Hague and Lausanne; on loan to the Mauritshuis, The Hague, as Anonymous Dutch School, 1897-98;³…; private collection, Switzerland, as Hendrick Berckman (‘Admiral Michiel Adriaensz de Ruyter im Kreise seiner Flottenschefs und Offiziere’), 1945;⁴…; sale, Nathan Katz (1893-1949, Basel), Paris (M. Rheims, Galerie Charpentier), 7 December 1950, no. 3, as Hendrick Berckman (‘L’Admiral de Ruyter assistant à une cérémonie’), fr. 150,000, to the museum

Object number: SK-A-3829

The artist

Willem Eversdijck (Goes c. 1616/20 - Middelburg 1671)

Willem Eversdijck was born in Goes between 1610 and 1620 as the son of the Catholic painter Cornelis Willemsz Eversdijck. He trained as an artist in Antwerp, and in the 1633-34 financial year he was registered in the ledgers of the city’s Guild of St Luke as a pupil of Cornelis de Vos. He settled in Middelburg in or around 1642 and remained there for the rest of his life. He joined the local Guild of St Luke between 2 February 1652 and 18 April 1653. On 15 June 1653 he married Blasina van Ossewaarde in Goes. His earliest known signed and dated painting is a civic guard piece.⁵ Eversdijck’s name appears several times in the guild archives, remarkably often for failing to turn up at the funerals of fellow members. The ownership of properties and a loan made to a shipowner suggest that he was reasonably well-off. Eversdijck died in Middelburg and was buried in Goes on 9 March 1671.

Eversdijck worked in several genres, but his extant oeuvre is small. It runs to around 20 paintings and includes several large group portraits, such as that of the members of the St Sebastian Guild of 1665.⁶ A few of his likenesses are known only from prints. The artist’s one documented pupil was Isaack Jansz Vleeshouwer, who studied with him in 1657-58.

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

References
P. de la Rue, Geletterd Zeeland: Verdeeld in drie afdeelingen, bevattende in zig de schryvers, geleerden en kunstenaars, uit dien staat geboortig, met bygevoegd levensverhaal der voornaamsten onder dezelve, Middelburg 1734, p. 323; J. van Gool, De nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en schilderessen: Waer in de levens- en kunstbedryven er tans levende en reets overleedene schilders, die van Houbraken, noch eenig ander schryver, zyn aengeteekend, verhaelt worden, I, The Hague 1750, pp. 43-44; J. Immerzeel Jr, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van het begin der vijftiende eeuw tot heden, I, Amsterdam 1842, p. 226; C. Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van den vroegsten tot op onzen tijd, I, Amsterdam 1857, p. 447; A. Bredius, ‘De gildeboeken van St. Lucas te Middelburg’, in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], VI, Rotterdam 1884-87, pp. 106-264, esp. pp. 186, 191-93, 197, 198, 202, 205, 208, 209; P. Haverkorn van Rijsewijk, ‘De schuttersstukken uit Goes’, in ibid., VII, 1888-90, pp. 166-83, esp. pp. 180-83; Moes and Lilienfeld in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XI, Leipzig 1915, p. 111; A.W.E. Dek, ‘Het geslacht Eversdijk uit Goes’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 27 (1973), pp. 272-93, esp. p. 292; F. van der Ploeg and C.E. Zonnevylle-Heyning, ‘Brave koppen en gladde aengesigten’: De Goese schutters en hun schilders: C.W. Eversdijck, W.C. Eversdijck en P. Peuteman, Middelburg 1999, pp. 111-20; Römer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XXXV, Munich/Leipzig 2003, p. 423

Entry

This allegory commemorates the episode in Dutch history when herring fishing was banned at the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67).⁷ It was done to ensure that there were enough fighting men for the admiralties to call on. After the Republic’s success at sea there was a brief time of great prosperity in which trade, shipping and the herring fishery again flourished. This painting celebrates the revival of the latter activity by showing a crowd of admirals and vice-admirals landing a catch. A few of them are hauling the nets in on the left, watched by a second group, of which the men on the right are about to go out hunting. Roughly half of the people depicted have been securely identified, among them Michiel Adriaensz de Ruyter seated in the centre with his son Engel beside him on the left, and several members of the Evertsen seafaring family.⁸ Although some of the men look a bit comical to modern eyes, such as the one about to cut the head off a herring to the right of De Ruyter,⁹ the scene was undoubtedly intended as a tribute.

Some or all of the portraits were based on existing models. De Ruyter, for instance, was copied from a 1667 likeness of him painted by Ferdinand Bol.¹⁰ That means that the allegory has to be dated in or shortly after that year, because the period of prosperity it depicts did not last long.

The canvas is unsigned, but given the skyline of Vlissingen in the background it is logical to think of a Zeeland artist.¹¹ When the painting was acquired in 1950 it was attributed to Hendrick Berckman, who was active in Middelburg. In 1957 Van Luttervelt came up with the name of Willem Eversdijck,¹² and there is indeed some affinity with the oeuvre of this portraitist,¹³ but the picture is not up to the standard of his signed work. The clumsy grouping of the figures and the harsh, almost caricatural heads raise doubts, but the attribution is being retained until a better candidate is found.

There are four known versions of this composition,¹⁴ all of which are unsigned but appear to come from the same studio. The one in Liverpool is the closest to the Rijksmuseum painting.¹⁵ Two more variants are in Rotterdam and the French town of Falaise,¹⁶ and differ from the Liverpool and Amsterdam works and each other in the arrangement of the figures and the backgrounds. This may have had something to do with the clients for whom they were made. The Rijksmuseum canvas is regarded as the original,¹⁷ but the one in Rotterdam seems to have the better claim since the portraits and foliage are more refined (fig. a).

It is unlikely that the Rijksmuseum allegory was commissioned by a naval hero who had a fountain with Neptune in his garden, as has been suggested,¹⁸ for lavish fountains of that kind certainly did not exist in the Republic at the time. The one depicted here is imaginary. The bottom half is based on an etching by the French printmaker Jean le Pautre (1618-1682),¹⁹ and the artist probably used another source for his figure of Neptune.²⁰

The provenance of this Allegory of the Revival of the Dutch Herring Fishery before 1945, when it was on display in the Kunstmuseum in Basel, is not known.²¹ Van Luttervelt argued that it may have been the painting from the collection of Jonkvrouw Elizabeth Adriana de Jonge that was in an exhibition in Vlissingen about Michiel de Ruyter in 1894.²² The description of it, ‘Scene with the leading fleet commanders, with De Ruyter in the middle’, is admittedly very cursory, but in view of the exceptional nature of the subject and the fact that the picture surfaced in Basel 13 years after the death of Elizabeth Adriana de Jonge in Lausanne, his hypothesis is plausible. It is strengthened by her relationship as daughter-in-law of the archivist and maritime historian Johan Cornelis de Jonge, who wrote a standard work on the revival of the herring fishery in the second half of the 1660s.²³ Since his family came from Zeeland, and according to Van Luttervelt was actually related to the seafaring Evertsen dynasty, it is very possible that he owned the painting at one time.²⁴

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

R. van Luttervelt, ‘Herinneringen aan Michiel Adriaenszoon de Ruyter in het Rijksmuseum’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 5 (1957), pp. 28-70, esp. pp. 62-63; F. van der Ploeg and C.E. Zonnevylle-Heyning, ‘Brave koppen en gladde aengesigten’: De Goese schutters en hun schilders: C.W. Eversdijck, W.C. Eversdijck en P. Peuteman, Middelburg 1999, pp. 118, 139, no. WE17

Collection catalogues

1976, p. 223, no. A 3829

Citation

Gerdien Wuestman, 2024, 'attributed to Willem Eversdijck, Allegory of the Revival of the Dutch Herring Fishery after the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67), c. 1667 - c. 1670', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.10001

(accessed 22 November 2024 16:11:26).

Figures

fig. a Attributed to Willem Eversdijck, *Allegory of the Revival of the Dutch Herring Fishery after the Second Anglo-Dutch War (1665-67)*, c. 1667-70. Oil on canvas, 116 x 169 cm. Rotterdam, Maritiem Museum