Object data
oil on panel
support: height 73.5 cm × width 99.5 cm
Moyses van Wtenbrouck
c. 1625 - c. 1627
oil on panel
support: height 73.5 cm × width 99.5 cm
The support is a single oak panel bevelled on all sides. The ground has an ochre colour, and the extensive underdrawing is visible with the naked eye in places. Wtenbrouck did not rigidly follow his underdrawing. There are a number of small pentimenti. The waterfall, for example, originally began higher up, and Pharaoh’s daughter has a second little finger on her left hand. The head of the woman beside her was originally placed higher.
Fair. There are two splits in the panel on the left and right. These are stable, but the retouchings here, in the sky, and the legs of the two nudes in the foreground have discoloured. The rush basket is abraded on the left, and the blue veil wrapped around Moses has become somewhat transparent.
...; from the dealer P. de Boer, Amsterdam, fl. 90,000, to the museum, with support from the Fotocommissie, 1975
Object number: SK-A-4673
Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Stichting tot Bevordering van de Belangen van het Rijksmuseum
Copyright: Public domain
Moyses van Wtenbrouck (The Hague c. 1590/1600 - The Hague 1645/47)
Moyses Matheusz van Wtenbrouck’s date of birth is estimated to have been between 1590 and 1600, based on the fact that his earliest dated work, an etching of Peter Healing the Lame Man at the Door of the Temple, is dated 1615.1 His first dated painting, a Judgement of King Midas, is from 1622.2 He had joined the Guild of St Luke in The Hague two years earlier, in 1620. As he was charged the same low fee as other painters born in The Hague, it is believed that this was also Wtenbrouck’s place of birth. His brother, Jan Matheusz, joined the guild in 1614. In 1627 Moyses van Wtenbrouck served as dean in the guild, and in 1638 his name was put forward to serve on a committee to select two new heads for this institution. By 1624 he had married Cornelia van Wyck, who is recorded as his widow in 1647. Moyses van Wtenbrouck must have died sometime between 1645 (in a document from that year he is referred to as still being alive) and 1647. It is often hypothesized in the earliest literature on the artist that he travelled to Italy. However, no documentary evidence for such a trip has been found. Nor is it known who his teacher was.
Apart from one painted portrait, Wtenbrouck’s extant oeuvre consists of landscapes with mythological and Old Testament subjects. More than half of his paintings depict themes taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His paintings from the 1620s show the influence of such Pre-Rembrandtists as Pieter Lastman and Claes Moeyaert, while a debt to Cornelis van Poelenburch has been detected in his work from after that period. Wtenbrouck also executed a number of etchings. Constantijn Huygens praised him in his autobiography, and he was one of the artists who decorated Honselaarsdijk. His last dated painting, the 1642 Mythological Scene originally hung in this palace.3 Wtenbrouck was the teacher of Dirk Dalens I (c. 1600-76) and the two sons of the carpenter Sacharias van Dalem, from whom he purchased a house in 1642.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Obreen III, 1880-81, pp. 262, 271, IV, 1881-82, p. 4, V, 1882-83, pp. 72, 305; Bredius III, 1917, pp. 921-35, VII, 1921, pp. 236-37; Weisner 1963, I, pp. 212-18; Weisner 1964, pp. 189-91; Buijsen in The Hague 1998, pp. 272-76, 361
Wtenbrouck’s earliest known treatment of the finding of Moses is a painting dated 1623.4 The present painting was undoubtedly executed later; the dating to around 1625 given in the announcement of its acquisition in 1976 can be fully endorsed.5 The composition with a river at the bottom and an inclining bank is most similar to Wtenbrouck’s 1625 Silenus and the Phrygian Peasant.6 Also similar is the vine-covered tree on the left of both compositions, which is cut off by the top edge of the picture. In both paintings the branches form a canopy for the figures. Weisner called this type of landscape in Wtenbrouck’s oeuvre ‘heroic Italian’. A salient feature in the Amsterdam painting is the use of Roman ruins in the background.7 Such landscapes and the types of trees and vegetation that appear in them were undoubtedly inspired by the work of Jacob Pynas and Claes Moeyaert. Like his 1627 Triumph of Bacchus in Braunschweig8 and other works by Wtenbrouck from the mid to late-1620s, the landscape is composed of planes, beginning with a diagonally placed row of figures in the foreground. Alternating bands of light and shadow reinforce these planes. Precisely in the same manner as the Braunschweig Triumph of Bacchus, the secondary figures in the Rijksmuseum painting are cast in shadow. The sturdy figure types are also indicative of Wtenbrouck’s production in the mid and late-1620s, and differ remarkably in scale from the staffage in his earlier and later landscapes. This figure type, as well as the primary colours of their drapery, can also be traced back to the Pre-Rembrandtists. Indeed, Wtenbrouck’s depictions of the Triumph of Bacchus in Braunschweig and Kassel9 both dated 1627, were probably inspired by Moeyaert’s 1624 painting of this subject.10 Wtenbrouck, however, seems to have had knowledge of one of Moeyaert’s own models, Annibale Carracci’s fresco in the Palazzo Farnese.
There is also a possibility that a work, Landscape with Women Bathing from around 1618,11 by another Bolognese classicist, Guercino, might have inspired Wtenbrouck’s Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses in the Rush Basket. Guercino’s painting shows a similar diagonal arrangement in the foreground, and has a river at the bottom of the composition and a tree on the left. In his painting as well, women, whose poses can be compared with Wtenbrouck’s foreground nudes, are seen emerging from the water. A diagonally placed parapet, adorned with a sphinx in the Amsterdam painting, is also present in Guercino’s composition. The similarities with the work by Guercino may be purely coincidental. On the other hand, the Dutch artist could have seen this painting or a similar one if he did, indeed, travel to Italy. Another possibility is that the Landscape with Women Bathing, a small work that could be easily transported, entered a Dutch collection early on.12
At any rate, the comparison with Guercino’s non-biblical scene highlights the exceptional nature of the Rijksmuseum painting, which does not immediately reveal its true subject matter to the viewer. At first glance, one is put in mind of depictions of Diana and her Nymphs Bathing. Significantly, Wtenbrouck made an etching of this subject,13 and a painting of a related subject by him is recorded in an early 18th-century sale catalogue.14 It is only on closer inspection that one detects the sphinx and the head of the tiny Moses between the two voluptuous nudes in the foreground. The amount of female nudity Wtenbrouck introduced in this depiction of Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses in the Rush Basket was unique at the time, and would never be truly paralleled in the 17th century (although Cornelis van Poelenburch15 and Paulus Bor (SK-A-852) are examples of artists who did come close). A number of Wtenbrouck’s undated prints show nudes in similar poses to those in the present painting.16
A copy of the Rijksmuseum picture was in Kunsthaus Schloss Ahlden in Ahlden/Aller in 1983.17
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. 349.
Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum XXIV (1976), p. 140
1976, p. 910, no. A 4673; 1992, p. 88, no. A 4673; 2007, no. 349
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Moyses van Wtenbrouck, Pharaoh’s Daughter Discovers Moses in the Rush Basket (Exodus 2:5-6), c. 1625 - c. 1627', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5620
(accessed 10 November 2024 16:29:59).