Rijksmuseum

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 68.5 cm × width 58 cm
outer size: depth 6.7 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature and date, centre right (no longer visible): A. de Vries ... 16[42]

Technical notes

The oak support consists of three planks and has been thinned down and cradled. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1614. The panel could have been ready for use by 1628, but a date in or after 1633 is more likely. The white ground layer is visible in the collar where the paint has become transparent. The paint layers were smoothly applied with no visible brushmarking and some impasto highlights. A larger, white cap is visible as a pentimento beneath the present widow’s peak worn by the figure.

Scientific examination and reports

X-radiography: De Wild, present whereabouts unknown, 1932
technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 5 November 2004
dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 2 May 2005

Literature scientific examination and reports

Cleveringa 1961, p. 66

Condition

Fair. The painting is moderately abraded, especially in the face. The varnish is very discoloured and there are residues of old varnish in the face and collar.

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1961: cleaned

Provenance

...; purchased from the dealer Frederik Muller, Paris, by Isaac de Bruijn (1872-1953), through the mediation of Dr F. Schmidt-Degener, 1932; bequeathed by Isaac de Bruijn and his wife, Johanna Geertruida van der Leeuw (1877-1960), Spiez and Muri, near Bern, to the museum, 1961

Object number: SK-A-4053

Credit line: Mr and Mrs De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland

The artist

Abraham de Vries (? The Hague c. 1590/95 - ? The Hague c. 1648/50)

Abraham de Vries’s early life is sketchy, and nothing is known about his training. Although his place of birth is given in the older literature as Katendrecht (near Rotterdam), when he joined the painters’ guild in The Hague in 1644 he paid the low fee natives of the town were charged. In the absence of documents, his date of birth can only be surmised from his dated works, the earliest of which is a landscape drawing from 1613.¹ According to the inscription on this drawing, it was executed in Lyon. De Vries is documented in Rotterdam in 1617. His earliest dated painting is the 1621 Self-Portrait in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-2157), which was probably also executed outside of the United Provinces as it is signed ‘A. de Vries Batavus’ (A. de Vries, Dutchman). In 1623, he was in Aix-en-Provence, where he portrayed a local magistrate.² Thanks to the preserved correspondence of the French humanist Nicolas Claude Fabri de Peiresc, whom De Vries apparently befriended in Aix, we are well informed of the artist’s – quite frequent – movements during the rest of the 1620s. De Vries was in Aix in 1624, Montpellier and probably Béziers and Toulouse in 1625, Bordeaux in 1626, and Paris in 1627-28. From Paris, he travelled to Antwerp, where a letter of recommendation from Peiresc secured a meeting with Rubens. From documents and, especially, the inscriptions on his paintings it is known that the 1630s and 40s were also quite restless decades for the artist. In the 1630s, he was mostly active in Paris and Antwerp, joining the painters’ guild in the latter city in 1634, but also briefly in Amsterdam where his brother Isaac lived and where he portrayed the Regents of the City Orphanage in 1633.³ Between 1639 and 1643, he was in Rotterdam, after which he settled in The Hague.

In 1648, De Vries made a will, and he probably died in the same or in the following year. Payment for a portrait of Maria Elisabeth II, Marchioness of Bergen, by an artist identified simply as ‘De Vries’ was made in 1649 or 1650 not to the artist himself, but to a certain Sara de Vries. The latter may well have been the daughter of Abraham de Vries’s brother Isaac, who was born in Amsterdam in 1623.⁴

Except for one history piece, a depiction of St Jerome inspired by Ter Brugghen that was probably painted in France in the 1620s,⁵ De Vries’s extant oeuvre is composed of portraits. His work is quite varied in style as he constantly absorbed new impulses from the leading artists in the different centres in which he worked.

Among the evidence suggesting that he was held in high regard are two portraits that De Vries executed of his fellow artists, the Antwerp painter Simon de Vos, and the Amsterdam painter Gillis de Hondecoeter.⁶

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

References
Obreen III, 1880-81, p. 258; V, 1882-83, pp. 77, 102; Ruelens 1882 (letters from Peiresc); coll. cat. Rotterdam 1892, p. 268; Haverkorn van Rijsewijk 1901, p. 61; Hannema 1928, p. 433; Foucart 1980; Van Mosselveld 1982, pp. 68, 70, note 7; Ekkart in coll. cat. Rotterdam 1995, p. 198; Löffler in The Hague 1998, p. 358; Ekkart 2005b

Entry

The fact that the white cap the sitter was originally shown wearing in this half-length portrait was painted out and replaced with the present pointed black cap, suggests that the portrait had to be altered shortly after its execution because of a death in the woman’s family, possibly that of her husband. Such black caps, or widow’s peaks as they were known (tips in Dutch), were often, but not exclusively, worn by women in mourning.⁷ The woman is also not shown wearing jewellery, another possible indication that she was in mourning.

The signature of Abraham de Vries and date, which were uncovered after the painting was cleaned in 1961, are no longer visible.⁸ The date was thought at that time to possibly read ‘1642’. Taking into account the painting’s somewhat abraded condition, the detailed rendering of the woman’s features and the bourgeois character of her representation are thoroughly in keeping with De Vries’s production in the early 1640s. The sitter’s millstone ruff would have been old-fashioned by this time, but not an unusual item of dress for older women. It is probably the strong lighting and dark background that have prompted comparisons between this work and Rembrandt’s portraits.⁹

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. 332.

Literature