The Alchemist

c. 1660 - c. 1670

Object data

oil on panel

support: height 43.6 cm × width 38 cm
outer size: depth 10.8 cm (support incl. SK-L-4108)

Inscriptions

signature, bottom centre (T and w ligated): Twyck

Technical notes

Support The single, vertically grained, quarter-sawn oak plank is approx. 0.8-0.5 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled at the top and bottom and on the right, and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1640. The plank could have been ready for use by 1651, but a date in or after 1657 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, smooth, off-white ground extends over the edges of the support. It consists of mostly lead-white with a small addition of earth pigments.
Underdrawing Infrared photography and infrared reflectography revealed an underdrawing in a dry medium, also partly visible to the naked eye in thin, light areas, such as the face of the woman. It consists of sketchy, short, rather thick lines that indicate the composition very roughly, and is extremely cursory and difficult to read. Lines to the left of the standing boy show that he was initially planned closer to the table. Infrared reflectography also revealed three thin construction lines to aid a correct perspective on the left, in the window and wall.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light. The background consists of only one or two layers of thin, rather transparent paint leaving reserves for the compositional elements, but not for the smaller ones such as the festoons at the ceiling. The figures and other elements were undermodelled, introducing dark and light areas, with rather opaque, smooth paints in subdued brown, yellow, grey and white, applied wet in wet. Small, brightly coloured, somewhat oily, impasted brushstrokes and dabs of paints were applied to finalize the modelling and indicate highlights, and short black lines were added to enhance the contours and deepen the darkest shadows.
Ige Verslype, 2024

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: I. Verslype, RMA, 27 April 2009
paint samples: I. Verslype, RMA, nos. SK-A-489/1-2, 27 April 2009
technical report: I. Verslype, RMA, 27 April 2009
infrared reflectography: I. Verslype, RMA, 18 July 2013

Condition

Fair. Small, slightly discoloured retouchings are visible in several places, particularly in the woman. The paint layer is abraded throughout, especially in the thinly applied light brown areas. The varnish has slightly yellowed.

Conservation

W. Hesterman, 1979: complete restoration

Provenance

…; sale, Daniel Gerard van der Burgh (1755-1824), Kronenburg Castle, Loenen, sold on the premises (J. Sanderson), 6 September 1824, no. 4 (‘Een alchimist en zijn huisgezin, zittende in zijne werkplaats bij het venster, sprekende met een hem vragend jongeling, het vertrek rijk gestoffeerd met veel toepasselijk bijwerk’), fl. 385, to Johannes Rombouts (1772-1850), Dordrecht;¹ his nephew, Leendert Dupper Willemsz (1799-1870), Dordrecht, 1850; by whom bequeathed to the museum, with 63 other paintings, 12 April 1870²

Object number: SK-A-489

Credit line: Dupper Wzn. Bequest, Dordrecht

The artist

Thomas Wijck (Beverwijk c. 1616/21 - Haarlem 1677)

Houbraken thought that Thomas Wijck was born in 1616, but there are no contemporary records to confirm this. Since Wijck registered with the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1642 it can be assumed that he was at least 21 years old at the time. His place of birth was probably Beverwijk, where his parents were still living in 1642. Wijck married Trijntgen (Catharina) Adamsdr in Haarlem in 1644, and because she was a Catholic the ceremony was carried out in the presence of the aldermen.

There is still a debate as to whether the artist ever visited Italy, as reported by Houbraken. Since his early work was informed by the Haarlem School it is unlikely that Wijck went there before joining the guild. The Haarlem influence, and that of Adriaen van Ostade in particular, is taken as evidence that he was the latter’s pupil. Wijck’s earliest dated picture, View in an Italianate Courtyard, a drawing of 1643, betrays a southern approach in the depiction of the courtyard.³ With this subject, he was following in the footsteps of Pieter van Laer, who had returned to the Netherlands from Rome in 1639. The style, though, is still entirely that of Van Ostade. Although there is no documentation of a sojourn in Italy, neither is there any evidence that Wijck was in Haarlem between his marriage in 1644 and 28 April 1653, when he acted as a witness in a case of theft. Such a trip is supported by the fact that drawings of his on Italian paper are known, as well as by the existence of a series of sketches of the same courtyard that was very probably made on the spot.⁴

Wijck served as warden of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke in 1657-58, 1668-69, 1671-72 and 1676, and as dean in 1660 and 1669-70. In 1663 he deputized his wife to look after his affairs. This was very probably necessitated by his trip to England, where he was during the Great Fire of London in September 1666. According to Horace Walpole, the artist made several paintings of the event.⁵ Wijck was appointed warden of the guild for the second time in 1668, so he was back in Haarlem by then. He travelled to London again in 1674, probably in connection with the enrolment of his son Jan (1644-1702) in the city’s guild. Jan, who made his career in England and remained there until his death, was trained by his father, as were Jan van der Vaart (1642-1727) and Jan van Huchtenburg (1647-1733). Wijck died in Haarlem, where he was buried in the Grote Kerk on 19 August 1677.

In addition to southern courtyards and Italianate harbour scenes, Wijck painted peasant interiors, philosophers’ studies and alchemists’ laboratories. He rarely dated his works. The last one, a drawing of the ruins of the palace of Septimus Severus on the Palatine Hill in Rome, is from 1670.⁶

Richard Harmanni, 2024

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, II, Amsterdam 1719, pp. 16-17; H. Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting in England: With Some Account of the Principal Artists, and Incidental Notes on Other Arts: Collected by the Late Mr. George Vertue, II, Strawberry-Hill 1762, p. 234; A. van der Willigen, Geschiedkundige aanteekeningen over Haarlemsche schilders en andere beoefenaren van de beeldende kunsten, voorafgegaan door eene korte geschiedenis van het schilders- of St. Lucas Gild aldaar, Haarlem 1866, p. 245; A. von Wurzbach, Niederländisches Künstler-Lexikon, II, Leipzig/Vienna 1910, pp. 906-07; U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XXXVI, Leipzig 1947, pp. 324-25; Blankert in A. Blankert, H.J. de Smedt and M.E. Houtzager, Nederlandse 17e eeuwse Italianiserende landschapschilders, exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum) 1965, pp. 144-45; H. Miedema, De archiefbescheiden van het St. Lucasgilde te Haarlem, 1497-1798, 2 vols., Alphen aan den Rijn 1980, passim; A.C. Steland, ‘Thomas Wijck als italienisierender Zeichner: Beobachtungen zu Herkunft, Stil und Arbeitsweise’, Wallraf-Richartz-Jahrbuch 48-49 (1987-88), pp. 215-47, esp. pp. 215-17; P. Schatborn, Drawn to Warmth: 17th-Century Dutch Artists in Italy, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001, pp. 117-22; I. van Thiel-Stroman, ‘Biographies 15th-17th Century’, in P. Biesboer et al., Painting in Haarlem 1500-1850: The Collection of the Frans Hals Museum, coll. cat. Haarlem 2006, pp. 99-363, esp. pp. 347-48

Entry

An alchemist in his laboratory was a popular subject in seventeenth-century painting. The long visual tradition shows how people viewed science and alchemy in a particular period.⁷ In sixteenth-century literature and art, human folly was symbolized by an alchemist doggedly trying to turn base metals into gold, beggaring his family in the process. One of the best-known examples is Philips Galle’s engraving after a drawing of 1558 by Pieter Brueghel the Elder.⁸ The print made a major contribution to the popularity of the genre. In the seventeenth century, developments in cartography, optics and astronomy raised the standing of science, and as a result people became more lenient towards pseudo-sciences such as alchemy – the lines dividing the disciplines being difficult to draw anyway. The increasing tolerance was reflected in depictions of alchemists’ laboratories.⁹

Thomas Wijck portrayed his alchemist as a respectable scholar wearing a cap and fur-trimmed coat. Although the distilling apparatus that the artist so often included is missing here, the stuffed crocodile hanging on a cord from the ceiling to the right of the window and the strings of herbs speak volumes about what goes on in this laboratory. The mood is peaceful and domestic. The alchemist is talking to a boy, while a woman is doing household chores by the hearth in the background as she instructs a kneeling boy how to stoke the fire.

Alchemists’ laboratories and philosophers’ studies form far and away the bulk of Wijck’s genre pieces. There are dozens of them, and they display great variety and ingenuity in their compositions. Houbraken considered them typical of the artist’s oeuvre.¹⁰ According to Horace Walpole, George Vertue esteemed the laboratories as Wijck’s best work.¹¹

As far as the rendering of the actual interiors is concerned, Wijck was initially indebted to those of his presumed teacher, Adriaen van Ostade. That applies to every kind of space that Wijck painted. After his supposed sojourn in Italy, probably at some stage between 1644 and 1653, he incorporated his earlier fascination with southern courtyards imaginatively in his laboratories. We almost invariably look through an archway into an interior in which countless objects are strewn about. Apparently, the number of items, and in particular the highlighted bundles of paper, grew as time passed. However, it is difficult to arrive at a precise chronological order, because Wijck almost never dated his paintings. For example, the composition of an alchemist’s laboratory in Mainz is still fairly simple,¹² and does not contain as much paraphernalia as the one in the Rijksmuseum. The latter is more closely related to the laboratories in The Hague, Braunschweig, Kassel, Karlsruhe and Darmstadt, with its heaps of objects and impasted brushstrokes, and probably comes from the same period as them.¹³ All of these pictures are in Wijck’s more mature manner. Dendrochronology indicated that the Amsterdam panel was most likely painted in or after 1657.¹⁴ Given its late style, which is related to that of Peasant Woman Spinning,¹⁵ a date in the 1660s seems eminently plausible.

The museum acquired The Alchemist as part of the Leendert Dupper Bequest. There is a watercolour after it in the Dordrechts Museum that the collector and amateur artist made himself in 1842, when the painting still belonged to his nephew Johannes Rombouts.¹⁶

Richard Harmanni, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

C. Brown, ‘...Niet ledighs of ydels...’: Nederlandse genreschilders uit de 17e eeuw, Amsterdam 1984, pp. 71, 100

Collection catalogues

1870, p. 252, no. LX; 1880, p. 356, no. 418; 1976, p. 616, no. A 489

Citation

Richard Harmanni, 2024, 'Thomas Wijck, The Alchemist, c. 1660 - 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.6558

(accessed 23 November 2024 13:27:51).