Portrait of Govert van Slingelandt (1623-1690), with his First Wife Christina van Beveren (1632-1656) and their Two Children

Entry

When this picture was restituted to the Dutch State after the Second World War, it was regarded as a portrait of an unknown family. During the relining of the work shortly before it was given on loan to the museum in 1955, however, the names of the sitters on the back of the original canvas were revealed, as ‘Govert van Slingelandt, Christina van Beveren and their two children’,¹⁰ and then calligraphed onto the reverse of the new support. Govert van Slingelandt, Lord of the Manor of Dubbeldam, was the Pensionary of Dordrecht, and he married Christina van Beveren in that city on 24 February 1654. Although it was his permanent residence Van Slingelandt’s official function often took him to The Hague. The eldest child of the couple, Barthout, was born there ten months after their wedding on 18 December, so the boy was over two years old when this painting was made in 1657. A daughter was christened Christina in the Grote Kerk in The Hague on 15 October 1656. The mother deceased two days later and was buried in Dordrecht on the 21th;¹¹ the infant would outlive her by just a few weeks and died on 11 December.

Van Slingelandt’s wife and his 2-month-old daughter are therefore posthumous portrayed here. Jan Mijtens expressed this with the garland of flowers around little Christina’s head and by showing her blowing bubbles. Those symbols of transience are often depicted in this context.¹² De Jongh’s suggestion that the pale complexions of the mother and daughter are also allusions to their deaths was rightly contradicted by Bauer, who pointed out that Mijtens’s women and children are always lighter-skinned than his men. Moreover, Barthout, who grew to adulthood, has the same pallid look.¹³ The couple’s act of holding hands and the presence of the dog, which according to De Jongh are references to marital fidelity,¹⁴ as well as the grapes held by the boy as a sign of his parents’ chaste lifestyle, are clearly significant motifs.

Mijtens always placed his families against a landscape background, and by doing so made an original contribution to portraiture in the Dutch Republic. Oddly enough, he mainly painted them in the first half of his career, and there was a sharp decline in this type of works in the 1660s.¹⁵ He generally spread the figures across the whole scenery, in which there is often a view through to the distance. Here they are shown close together and a vista in the mountainous area behind them is lacking.

Govert van Slingelandt remarried in Dordrecht in 1661, his second wife being the widow Arnoudina van Beaumont,¹⁶ who bore him several more children. His professional life was equally prosperous. After appointments as ambassador to Sweden, Poland, Prussia and Denmark he was made secretary to the Council of State. He would have owed much of this to his great friendship with Grand Pensionary of Holland Johan de Witt, to whom he was also related.¹⁷ Barthout followed in Van Slingelandt’s footsteps by embarking on a career as an administrator and diplomat and was made a baron of the Holy Roman Empire. After his father’s death Mijtens’s portrait may have passed to him. The picture is mentioned in 1761 in the estate of Barthout’s son Hendrik, but it is not clear what happened to it after that. The family died out in the male line in 1878.¹⁸ Moes mentions the painting around 1900, but he only knew of its existence from documents.¹⁹ In 1942 it belonged to a certain J.J. Thole of Huizen, who was not demonstrably affiliated to the Van Slingelandts. The portrait was auctioned on 23 December of that year and eventually acquired for Hitler’s collection. It was recuperated after the war and became the property of the Dutch state.²⁰ It is clear from the description in the 1942 sale catalogue that it was no longer known who the sitters were, so the lining canvas that concealed their names had evidently been added before then.

Mijtens may have based his posthumous likeness of Christina van Beveren on a painting of her from 1650, when she was 17 or 18 years old. That picture, though, is known only from a drawn copy by Mattheus Verheijden,²¹ and there is no information on the artist of the original. The portraits in Mijtens’s canvas were reworked into individual drawings in the eighteenth century, by Verheijden among others, and two of those pendants are now in the Van Slingelandt family archives, which have been given to the High Council of Nobility for safekeeping. Other pairs are still in the possession of the sitters’ descendants.

Richard Harmanni, 2023

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements