Object data
oil on panel
support: height 91 cm × width 120 cm
Jan Lievens
Still Life with Books
c. 1628 - c. 1632
Technical notes
Support The panel consists of three horizontally grained oak planks (approx. 29.3, 29 and 32.7 cm), approx. 0.5-1.5 cm thick. The reverse was thinned in four vertical bands to which L-shaped blocks were glued to hold crossbars (the latter now removed). There are remnants of a bevel at the bottom. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1607. The panel could have been ready for use by 1618, but a date in or after 1624 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The singe, thin, beige ground does not extend over the edges of the support. It contains some large white pigment particles with a small addition of minute earth pigment particles in a slightly translucent beige matrix.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared reflectography.
Paint layers The paint does not extend over the edges of the support. X-radiography, infrared reflectography (IRR) and macro X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (MA-XRF) revealed that the painting was conceived in three stages. With the naked eye, some of the subsequent changes are also faintly visible in the paint surface, especially in raking light. Initially the panel was turned 90º counterclockwise and depicted a knee-length portrait of a woman with a broad, white collar and lace headdress. Her right arm is akimbo and in her right hand she holds what appears to be a fan. From the MA-XRF lead map (Pb-L) it can be concluded that her left arm is extended downwards and she supports herself with her palm resting on an object. The MA-XRF copper map (Cu-K) reveals a very fine floral pattern in her dress and the outer (perhaps lace) edge of the fan. Considering the amount of detail visible in the X-rays, infrared images and MA-XRF maps, this portrait must have been completely finished before it was painted over. This was confirmed by cross-sections, which reveal not only a multi-layered paint build-up in the portrait of the woman, but also a varnish layer in between it and the book still life. The latter was executed wet in wet, in a rather broad and free manner with visible brushwork. The individual strokes often follow the forms of the objects, which contributes to the suggestion of volume. Details, such as the lines and dabs that indicate the separate pages of the books, show the use of a fairly unctuous paint, with some impasto along one edge of the brushstrokes. These sometimes skipped over the underlying layer, resulting in a lively textured surface. For the third stage, the ‘breakfast piece’ at the lower left, a different technique was used with smooth, dense, wet-in-wet paint application without discernible brushstrokes, and thick, impasted, almost sculpted paint for the highlights and reflections. The difference in execution and the fact that this part was added over the finished book composition, indicate that this phase was probably completed later.
Gwen Tauber, Ige Verslype, 2025
Scientific examination and reports
- X-radiography: RMA, nos. 1126-1135, 12 February 1962
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 19 October 1995
- paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, nos. R 37/1-7, 2 November 1998
- paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, nos. R 37/8-11, 15 November 1998
- paint samples: A. Wallert, RMA, nos. 128/1-4, 2006
- infrared reflectography: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 September 2012
- technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 12 September 2012
Literature scientific examination and reports
A. Wallert, ‘Drie halen, één betalen’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 54 (2006), pp. 144-53
Condition
Fair. The thinning of the reverse has weakened the panel. Insect damage is apparent at the bottom, and in three places new pieces of wood were inserted. Extensive retouching is visible in ultraviolet light at the edges of the panel, along the joins, at the contours of the glass and bread, and in the pages of the book with the dark cover on the far right of the composition where the headdress of the portrait had become visible. The varnish has slightly yellowed.
Conservation
- H. Kat, 1998: complete restoration
Provenance
...; the dealer Basil Wheeler, London;1...; the dealer Montpellier Galleries, London, as P. Potter, 28 April 1960;2...; the dealer Han Jüngeling, The Hague (on loan to the Dordrechts Museum), 1960-63;3 from whom, fl. 75,000, to the museum, as a gift from the Commissie voor Fotoverkoop, 1963
Object number: SK-A-4090
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Jan Lievens (Leiden 1607 - Amsterdam 1674)
According to the account published by the Leiden burgomaster and town chronicler Jan Jansz Orlers in 1641, Jan Lievens was born on 24 October 1607 in Leiden. His parents were Lieven Hendricxz, an embroiderer, and Machtelt Jansdr van Noortsant. When he was 8, his father apprenticed him to the Leiden artist Joris van Schooten, ‘from whom he learned the principles of both drawing and painting’.4 About two years later, in 1617 or 1618, the child prodigy was sent to study with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam. Upon his return to Leiden at the age of 12 Lievens set up a studio in his father’s house. Although not documented and not mentioned by Orlers, the style of his early works suggests that Lievens probably also spent some time in Utrecht and possibly Antwerp in the early 1620s. Indeed, instead of the small-scale, multi-figure histories for which Lastman is well known, Lievens’s early output consists primarily of broadly rendered, large-scale compositions with only one or a few half-length figures, shown life-size or larger than life. Lievens’s choice of biblical, allegorical and genre subjects in the 1620s also reflects the influence of the Utrecht Caravaggisti, Gerard van Honthorst, Hendrick ter Brugghen and Dirck van Baburen, as well as that of the great Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens. In addition to history and genre pieces, the young Leiden artist executed tronies, still lifes and portraits in this period, and became a talented printmaker. As his earliest signed and dated painting is from 1629,5 the chronology of the first decade of his output has been, and still is, open to debate.
Lievens began working closely with Rembrandt after the latter arrived back in Leiden around 1625 from a six-month apprenticeship with Lastman in Amsterdam. While the notion that the two shared a studio in Leiden is not supported by the early accounts of their careers – in fact, Orlers explicitly states that Rembrandt ‘decided to engage in and practice the art of painting entirely on his own’ after his return – Lievens and Rembrandt often treated the same subject matter, for example Samson and Delilah, the raising of Lazarus and Christ on the Cross.6 The fijnschilders style that the two artists developed together in the second half of the 1620s was already making it difficult for appraisers and connoisseurs to differentiate their hands during their lifetimes. Lievens’s early work was much sought after, at first by Leiden patrons, including his earliest biographer, Orlers. In 1628, Lievens and Rembrandt were visited in their respective studios by the stadholder’s secretary, Constantijn Huygens, the most powerful cultural broker in the Dutch Republic. Lievens ingratiated himself with Huygens by requesting to paint his likeness,7 and soon thereafter the court in The Hague began to acquire his work and offer him commissions. Some of Lievens’s pictures were also acquired by Sir Robert Kerr, representative of the English crown in The Hague, and in 1631 the exiled king of Bohemia, Frederick V, and his consort Elizabeth, a sister of King Charles I of England, commissioned Lievens to portray their son Prince Charles Louis, who was studying in Leiden at the time.8
In February 1632, Lievens moved to London where, according to Orlers, he painted portraits of King Charles I and his family, as well as various lords. Those works have not survived and little is known about Lievens’s output and career during his English period, which lasted until 1635. It was perhaps Anthony van Dyck’s return to England in the spring of 1635 that prompted Lievens to leave for Antwerp, where he registered as a member of the Guild of St Luke in that year and acquired citizenship in December 1640. In 1638, he married Susanna de Nole, daughter of the sculptor Andries Colijns de Nole. His father-in-law’s connections may have helped Lievens secure the commissions for two large altarpieces for the Jesuit churches in Antwerp and Brussels.9 Also in this period Lievens carried out a commission for Stadholder Frederik Hendrik and painted a monumental Magnanimity of Scipio for the council chamber of Leiden Town Hall, for which he was paid 1,500 guilders and awarded a gold medal.10 Besides history pieces, Lievens executed tronies and genre scenes during his Antwerp period, and branched out in the field of painting to produce landscapes and in the graphic arts into the medium of the woodcut. He completely abandoned his early style in favour of one heavily indebted to Adriaen Brouwer, Van Dyck and Rubens.
In 1644, Lievens moved with his wife and child to Amsterdam, where he first rented a room as either living or studio space from the artist couple Jan Miense Molenaer and Judith Leyster. Susanna de Nole died shortly afterward and Lievens married Cornelia de Bray, daughter of an Amsterdam notary, in 1648. Probably in the same year, he was commissioned to paint one of the works, The Five Muses, for the cycle of allegories commemorating the life of Frederik Hendrik in the Oranjezaal (Orange Hall) in Huis ten Bosch, which was completed in 1650.11 Frederik Hendrik and Amalia van Solms’s eldest daughter Louise Henriette married the Elector of Brandenburg, Friedrich Wilhelm von Hohenzollern, in 1646. In 1652, Lievens was invited to contribute to the decorations of their country seat, Schloss Oranienburg near Berlin. He moved there in 1653 and executed a large portrait historié of the couple as well as mythological scenes.12
Lievens returned to the Dutch Republic and resided in The Hague from 1654 until March 1659 at the latest. In 1656, he was involved in setting up Confrerie Pictura, a new painters’ confraternity that broke away from the local Guild of St Luke. Lievens received several important private and public commissions in these years, not only in The Hague but also in Amsterdam. For example, he was commissioned in 1655 to execute a large overmantel of Quintus Fabius Maximus and his Son for the burgomasters’ chamber of Amsterdam Town Hall, for which he was paid 1,500 guilders.13 Although he remained a non-resident member of the Confrerie Pictura in The Hague in 1660-61, Lievens moved back to Amsterdam by March 1659, probably with an eye to securing the commission for the series of eight monumental paintings for the lunettes of the Burgerzaal (Citizens’ Hall) in the Town Hall. After Govert Flinck, who had been awarded that project, died in 1660 before being able to execute them, Lievens was given the task of painting one of the lunettes, Brinio Raised on a Shield, for which he earned 1,200 guilders.14 Another important assignment in the 1660s was for an enormous Mars (Allegory of War) for Pieter Post’s newly constructed Statenzaal, the assembly room of the States of Holland and West Friesland in the Binnenhof in The Hague.15 Lievens completed this canvas in 1664 and in the same year set off for Cleves, probably in the hope of being selected to work on the decorations of Johan Maurits of Nassau’s newly renovated Schwanenburg Castle, another architectural project based on designs by Pieter Post. Lievens’s sojourn in Cleves is veiled in mystery and it is only known that by the spring of 1666 he was back in Amsterdam, where he remained until 1669. He spent the last five years of his life constantly on the move, living alternately in The Hague, Leiden and Amsterdam. Due at least in part to non-payments by some of his patrons, which was exacerbated by the economic malaise brought on by the Third Anglo-Dutch War (1672-74), Lievens experienced financial problems during much of his later career and died in poverty in Amsterdam in June 1674.
Throughout his career Lievens had several pupils, none of whom became significant artists in their own right. It was probably as early as his Leiden period that he instructed his younger brother Dirk (c. 1612-1650), who is known to have executed a few portraits around 1640. The otherwise obscure Hans van den Wijngaerde, who trained with Lievens in Antwerp for six years beginning in 1636, is his earliest documented pupil. According to Houbraken, who does not specify where the apprenticeship took place, Hendrik Schoock (1630-1707) from Utrecht was with Lievens after having studied with Abraham Bloemaert and before going on to Jan Davidsz de Heem. Based on Schoock’s date of birth, this would have been either in Antwerp, where De Heem was also active, or in Amsterdam shortly after Lievens moved there in 1644. In 1662, Erick van den Weerelt (1648-1715) was apprenticed by the Amsterdam Civic Orphanage to Lievens for a period of three years. The contract was extended for another three years in 1665. Lievens’s use of student help to execute some of his works is documented. According to his own testimony, his eldest son, Jan Andrea (1644-1680), painted the 1666 Geographer, an overmantel in the Gemeenlandshuis of the Rijnland polder board in Leiden, after his father’s design and with his assistance.16 He is also recorded in Lievens’s studio in Amsterdam in 1669 together with two Jewish assistants, Aron de Chavez (c. 1647-1705) and Jacob Cardoso Ribero (c. 1643-?), and a wealthy amateur, Jonas Witsen (1647-1675). Lievens’s last documented pupil was Dionys Godijn (c. 1652/57-after c. 1682), whose father apprenticed him to the master in The Hague for a period of two years beginning in 1670.
From contemporary sources it appears that Lievens was rather arrogant. Huygens detected this personality defect even in the youthful artist: ‘My only objection is his stubbornness, which derives from an excess of self-confidence’.17 Judging from a remark made by Sir Robert Kerr in a 1654 letter to his son, Lievens retained a sense of excessive self-esteem in his maturity as well: ‘[he] has so high a conceit of himself that he thinks there is none to be compared with him in all Germany, Holland, nor the rest of the seventeen provinces.’18
Jonathan Bikker, 2025
References
J.J. Orlers, Beschrijving der stad Leyden, Leiden 1641, pp. 375-77; P. Angel, Lof der Schilderkonst, Leiden 1642 – trans. M. Hoyle and annot. H. Miedema, ‘Philips Angel, Praise of Painting’, Simiolus 24 (1996), pp. 227-58, esp. pp. 245-46; J. von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675: Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. A.R. Peltzer, Munich 1925 (ed. princ. Nuremberg 1675), p. 186; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, pp. 212, 296-301; P. Rombouts and T. van Lerius, De Liggeren en andere historische archieven der Antwerpsche Sint Lucasgilde, onder zinspreuk ‘Wt jonsten versaemt’, II, Antwerp/The Hague 1876, pp. 61, 69, 139; F.J.P. van den Branden, Geschiedenis der Antwerpsche schilderschool, Antwerp 1883, pp. 863-66; J.A. Worp, ‘Constantijn Huygens over de schilders van zijn tijd’, Oud Holland 9 (1891), pp. 106-36, esp. pp. 125-31; E.W. Moes, ‘Jan Lievens’, Leids Jaarboekje 4 (1907), pp. 136-64; A. Bredius, Künstler-Inventare, I, The Hague 1915, pp. 186-227; Schneider in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXIII, Leipzig 1929, pp. 214-15; H. Schneider, Jan Lievens: Sein Leben und seine Werke, Haarlem 1932, pp. 1-10, 277-85, 289-303; W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986, pp. 1764-72; J. Bruyn, ‘Review of W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986’, Oud Holland 102 (1988), pp. 322-33, esp. pp. 327-28; E. Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, IV, Brussels 1989, p. 224, no. 1034; R. de Jager, ‘Meester, leerjongen, leertijd: Een analyse van zeventiende-eeuwse Noord-Nederlandse leerlingcontracten van kunstschilders, goud- en zilversmeden’, Oud Holland 104 (1990), pp. 69-111, esp. pp. 74, 98-99, doc. nos. 11, 12, 15, p. 102, doc. no. 31; P.J.M. de Baar and I.W.L. Moerman, ‘Rembrandt van Rijn en Jan Lievens, inwoners van Leiden’, in C. Vogelaar et al., Rembrandt & Lievens in Leiden: ‘Een jong en edel schildersduo’/Rembrandt & Lievens in Leiden: ‘A Pair of Young and Noble Painters’, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) 1991-92, pp. 24-38; E. Duverger, Antwerpse kunstinventarissen uit de zeventiende eeuw, V, Brussels 1991, pp. 100-01; Domela Nieuwenhuis in J. Turner (ed.), The Dictionary of Art, XIX, New York 1996, pp. 347-50; J.G.C.A. Briels, Vlaamse schilders en de dageraad van Hollands Gouden Eeuw 1585-1630, Antwerp 1997, pp. 352-53; A.K. Wheelock Jr, ‘Jan Lievens: Bringing New Light to an Old Master’, in A.K. Wheelock Jr et al., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Milwaukee (Milwaukee Art Museum)/Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2008-09, pp. 1-27
Entry
The existence of this monumental still life with its larger-than-life-sized objects only became known in 1960, when it was exhibited in Dordrecht as the work of an anonymous Leiden artist.19 By the time the Rijksmuseum purchased the panel in 1963 an X-radiograph had been made which revealed that the present composition had been executed over a fully finished portrait of a woman. Analysis of the X-radiography also demonstrated that the pewter jug, glass of wine and pewter plate with bread roll in the lower left corner had not been reserved but had been placed on top of the already completed still life with books.20 The museum considered the latter to be by Rembrandt, while the added elements of the ‘breakfast piece’ were ascribed to the Amsterdam painter Jan Jansz den Uyl.21 The attribution to Jan Lievens was first proposed in 1968 by Bauch, who pointed out in particular the similarities between the books and those in the artist’s series of the four Evangelists in Bamberg and the St Paul in Kingston.22 Subsequently, most scholars have rightly concurred with Bauch’s findings.23
Indeed, the closed book directly behind the bread roll is identical to the one in the Bamberg St Mark and the Kingston St Paul. More importantly, the execution of its limp yellowish-brown parchment cover is remarkably similar, if somewhat more refined in the Rijksmuseum Still Life, and the frothy impasto edges of the pages also have a parallel in the Bamberg and Kingston paintings. The subdued colouring and subtle chiaroscuro are also in keeping with Lievens’s approach in those works. As far as the added jug, glass, plate and roll are concerned, their rendering is too robust to be by Den Uyl, but it does have analogies in other pictures by Lievens.24 Painted more smoothly and densely than the rest of the still life, they may have been conceived by Lievens himself somewhat later on, as his style became increasingly refined during his Leiden years. Although the ‘breakfast piece’ constitutes a more substantial change to the composition, it is consistent with Lievens’s habit during the Leiden period of significantly modifying his pictures while working on them. Examples include the Rijksmuseum Old Woman Reading of 1624-25, in which the figure’s left hand was apparently an afterthought, and Samson and Delilah of 1626-27, in which Delilah’s left arm is a later addition,25 and The Lute Player in Baltimore from around 1628, which underwent a complete colour transformation as well as alterations to the position of the lute.26 Because of the rather more detailed technique of the present painting it should be placed later than the Bamberg Evangelists and the St Paul in Kingston, which were probably executed in 1626 or 1627. A broad dating between 1628 and 1632 would therefore seem to be warranted.27
While no signed still lifes by Lievens have come down to us, several are listed in seventeenth-century probate inventories.28 It was, therefore, a genre in which he worked. The mention in a 1742 auction catalogue of ‘A piece depicting a table on which [there is] a globe with books and other embellishments by Jan Lievens, height five feet six inches, width four feet three inches’,29 indicates that Lievens produced more than one book still life. Unfortunately, none of the descriptions of still-life paintings in seventeenth-century inventories are specific enough to identify them with the one in the Rijksmuseum. Wheelock’s suggestion that the ‘large breakfast piece by Master Jan Lievens’ listed in the 1640 inventory of the estate of the Leiden book dealer, city magistrate and historian Jan Jansz Orlers is identical with the Rijksmuseum panel is difficult to accept, as no mention is made of the prominently displayed books.30
In addition to the books and the ‘breakfast piece’ at the lower left, the picture includes a lute case, a celestial and a terrestrial globe, as well as artist’s paraphernalia. On the shelf on the back wall paint brushes lie next to a bowl and a flask, possibly containing oil or varnish, and beneath the shelf a maulstick rests on two nails, from one of which a palette dangles. There have been various interpretations of the work. At first it was simply regarded as a vanitas illustrating the transience of human knowledge, music and the visual arts.31 This reading was later challenged by Chong and Kloek, who pointed out the lack of such obvious vanitas symbols as skulls, extinguished candles or hourglasses.32 For them, the books, lute case and globes allude to the reflective side of the visual arts, represented by the items in the still life associated with painting, which are placed as it were on the same footing as the other liberal arts.33 Wheelock’s later view, which by no means contradicts theirs, is the first to attempt to explain the presence of the glass of wine and the bread roll. According to him they are Eucharistic symbols, and ‘by introducing them into a composition containing objects referring to art, music, and worldly knowledge, Lievens created an image that includes the spiritual and intellectual realms essential for nourishing both body and soul’.34 In 2011, Van Thiel made short shrift of Wheelock’s interpretation by pointing out that Christ obviously proclaimed that his blood was represented by red, not white, wine.35
For Van Thiel the key to interpreting the still life was the lute case, the presence of which instead of or in combination with an actual lute is, as he noted, unique.36 In an emblem with the motto ‘Degeneres’ (the Degenerates) in the Latin Emblemata published in 1564 (Dutch edition 1566) by the Hungarian humanist Joannes Sambucus, the lute case – the only time this humble object is given a starring role – indicates to the reader that it resembles a lute but is not one, for it cannot make a sound, and it compares itself to degenerate people who ‘boast of their noble origins but do not live up to them’.37 In Van Thiel’s view other objects in the composition also masquerade as something they are not. The brushes, palette and maulstick represent pictura, or painting, which ‘imitates and is not what she pretends to be’.38 The books too are impostors; most of them are ledger bindings characterized by limp covers instead of the text block and board bindings of ordinary books.39 They are not printed tomes containing scholarship, but are essentially loosely bound files holding practical information such as the handwritten records of a notary or the proceedings of a trial.40 The wine and bread roll may, according to Van Thiel, symbolize God’s blessings, forming an antithesis to the ‘corruption’ represented by the lute case, painter’s paraphernalia and books, because God’s blessings are bestowed on the righteous.41
As intriguing as Van Thiel’s reading is, it fails to convince, and not in the first place because, as he himself admitted, it assumes that the still life was commissioned by an erudite person who would have been familiar with the emblem in Sambucus’s sixteenth-century Emblemata. While one can readily imagine that the painting could have been made at the request of a learned individual, perhaps someone associated with the university in Leiden, the fact that ledger bindings figure as books containing scholarship in other works by Lievens – and for instance Rembrandt – runs counter to Van Thiel’s argument that they can only be interpreted here as files containing notary records or other practical information. In Lievens’s pictures of the Evangelists Mark and Luke in Bamberg and his St Paul in Kingston such bindings clearly serve as biblical manuscripts. In Rembrandt’s 1627 St Paul in Prison in Stuttgart,42 the 1628 Old Men Disputing in Melbourne43 and the 1634 Scholar Seated at a Table with Books in Prague,44 they apparently also contain scholarly texts, whether handwritten or printed. Moreover, the two smaller books in front of the globes do not fall into the category of ledger bindings.
It is perhaps because they were associated with scholarly writings that Lievens gave the ledger bindings such a prominent role here. Many of the numerous book still lifes produced in the Dutch Republic in the second half of the 1620s and early 1630s include clear allusions to vanitas, either in the form of such symbols as skulls and snuffed-out candles, or by way of the titles of the tomes depicted.45 A number of the vanitas still lifes that prominently feature books also depict musical instruments, and occasionally palettes and other painter’s paraphernalia.46 Although the Rijksmuseum work does not contain any explicit vanitas symbolism, the tattered condition of the aged books, the chipped stone ledge on which they lie and the dark and foreboding atmosphere do convey an undeniable sense of transience.47 If the message is that death spells the end of such worldly accomplishments as writing, learning, music and painting, perhaps the lute case was included, instead of a lute itself, in order literally to visualize that music has been silenced. The globes may also represent knowledge and learning, or their presence was meant to lend the vanitas theme a universal character.48 Finally, there is the question of the meaning of the wine and bread roll that were added to the composition as an afterthought, probably by Lievens himself. While the Eucharistic interpretation of these still-life elements proposed by Wheelock is not very convincing, Van Thiel’s suggestion that they symbolize God’s blessings is based on a rather obscure source, namely the record of an entertainment performed by a Haarlem chamber of rhetoric at a ceremonial entry in the second decade of the seventeenth century.49 Independent ‘breakfast pieces’ with glasses of wine and bread have been regarded in the literature as representations of the theme of temperantia, or moderation, one of the four cardinal virtues.50 By observing moderation one can live a righteous life on earth and have a chance of resurrection after death. The message of Lievens’s painting may therefore be that eternal life is not achieved by man’s earthly accomplishments but rather by the practice of temperance in all things.
Jonathan Bikker, 2025
See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
Literature
L.J. Bol, 5 Aanwinsten [van het] Dordrechts Museum: Bruiklenen en aankopen december 1960, Dordrecht 1960, pp. 5-8, 14-15, no. 1 (as Leiden School); L.J. Bol, Nederlandse stillevens uit de 17de eeuw, exh. cat. Dordrecht (Dordrechts Museum) 1962, p. 14 (as Leiden School); K.G. Boon, E.R. Meijer and T.H. Lunsingh Scheurleer, ‘Schenkingen en aankopen’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 11 (1963), pp. 63-65, esp. p. 63 (as Rembrandt and Jan Jansz den Uyl); Haak in Verslagen der Rijksverzamelingen van geschiedenis en kunst 1963 (annual report of the Rijksmuseum), pp. 18, 21 (as Rembrandt and Jan Jansz den Uyl); K. Bauch, ‘Zum Werk des Jan Lievens, II’, Pantheon 25 (1967), pp. 259-69, esp. pp. 261-62; B. Haak, Rembrandt: Zijn leven, zijn werk, zijn tijd, Amsterdam 1968, pp. 68-69 (as Rembrandt and Jan Jansz den Uyl); H. Schneider and R.E.O. Ekkart, Jan Lievens: Sein Leben und seine Werke, Amsterdam 1973, p. 354, no. S 380 (as possibly Lievens and Jan Jansz den Uyl); W. Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, III, Landau/Pfalz 1986, p. 1812, no. 1300; A. Chong and W.T. Kloek (eds.), Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550-1720, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Cleveland (The Cleveland Museum of Art) 1999-2000, pp. 146-48, no. 18, with earlier literature; Wheelock in A.K. Wheelock Jr et al., Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/Milwaukee (Milwaukee Art Museum)/Amsterdam (Museum Het Rembrandthuis) 2008-09, p. 102, no. 11; P.J.J. van Thiel, ‘An Interpretation of the Still Life with Books, Jug, Glass and Bread Roll, Attributed to Jan Lievens’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 59 (2011), pp. 287-98; B. Schnackenburg, Jan Lievens: Friend and Rival of the Young Rembrandt: With a Catalogue Raisonné of his Early Leiden Works 1623-1632, Petersberg 2016, pp. 127, 130-33, 435, 437, no. 244
Collection catalogues
1976, p. 473, no. A 4090 (as circle of Rembrandt); 1992, p. 63, no. A 4090
Citation
Jonathan Bikker, 2025, 'Jan Lievens, Still Life with Books, c. 1628 - c. 1632', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200107940
(accessed 6 December 2025 19:33:41).