Object data
oil on canvas
support: height c. 189 cm × width c. 147 cm
sight size: height 185.5 cm × width 144 cm
frame: height 212.5 cm × width 170.5 cm
Wybrand de Geest (workshop of)
c. 1630
oil on canvas
support: height c. 189 cm × width c. 147 cm
sight size: height 185.5 cm × width 144 cm
frame: height 212.5 cm × width 170.5 cm
The support is a lined canvas with a vertical strip of canvas approximately 13 cm wide added on the left. Cusping is visible along the right side of the seam and not along the outer left edge of the added strip. Moreover, the inscription Graeff Lodewijk [...] is up against the right side of the seam as if this was the outer edge of the painting. This and the finer weave of the strip indicate that it was probably a later addition. While cusping is visible at the left, right and bottom sides of the original canvas, there is no cusping at the top, indicating that it may have been cut down there. The ground layer, visible in areas of paint loss, appears to be whitish. Although the paint was applied in smooth, blended layers, the modelling was executed rather harshly.
Fair. The painting is abraded and flattened due to lining. The varnish is blanched, particularly on the added strip of canvas on the left.
? Frisian Stadholder’s Court, Leeuwarden; ? first mentioned in the ballroom in 1786 (‘[...] de Portraiten van de Vorstelyke Familie, zeer naauwkeurig door voornaame meesters’);1 estate inventory, Hof van Leeuwarden, ballroom, c. 1800 (‘Het schoorsteenstuk verbeeld Jan van Nassouw, Adolf van Nassouw, Hendrik van Nassouw, Lodewijk van Nasouw bij Mook gezneuveld Ao1574.’);2...; first recorded in the museum in 1808;3 on loan to the Stedelijk Museum Het Prinsenhof, Delft, since 1992
Object number: SK-A-566
Copyright: Public domain
Wybrand de Geest (Leeuwarden c. 1592 - Leeuwarden 1661/65)
Wybrand de Geest was probably born in Leeuwarden on 16 August 1592, going by the inscription on the back of his self-portrait (shown here) in the Rijksmuseum. It is likely that he received his initial training from his father, Simon Juckes de Geest, a glasspainter. It emerges from the contributions to his album amicorum that he trained with Abraham Bloemaert in Utrecht in 1613-14, and the same source shows that he travelled for seven years after completing his apprenticeship, and visited Paris and Aix-en-Provence. He spent most of his time in Rome, however, where he stayed from 1616. In the Schildersbent (Band of Painters) there he was given the nickname ‘The Frisian Eagle’, according to Houbraken because of his ‘high flight in art’. He was still in Rome in 1620, but was back in Leeuwarden in 1621, for in that year he painted the group portrait of the local Verspeeck family.4 He was to spend the rest of his life in Leeuwarden. A Catholic, he married before the magistrate on 19 October 1622, his bride being Hendrickje Uylenburgh. One of Hendrickje’s cousins was the father of Saskia, Rembrandt’s wife. De Geest moved in lofty circles, was himself not without means, served as a regent of a charitable institution in 1639, and bore a coat of arms. His children and grandchildren even felt that they belonged to the Frisian aristocracy. His praises were sung by the poet Joost van den Vondel while he was still alive, and several eulogies were written about portraits of his. It is not known when he died, but it was between 1661 and 1665. His last works date from 1660, and there is also a letter he wrote in 1661. In 1665 his wife was recorded as being a widow.
Although Houbraken called him a ‘fine history and portrait painter’, almost all his surviving works are portraits. After his return from Rome he became the favourite portrait painter of Ernst Casimir of Nassau-Dietz (later Stadholder of Friesland) and his wife Sophia Hedwig of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, of their son Hendrik Casimir, and of the landed aristocracy of Friesland. Fragments from the diaries of Hendrik’s brother, Willem Frederik, record that he visited De Geest on more than one occasion ‘to have myself painted’. De Geest must have had a studio with assistants, given the many commissions he received, of which copies were often made. His pupils included Jacob Potma (c. 1610-80) and his son Julius Franciscus de Geest (?-1699). In the course of 40 years his portraiture evolved from the solemn, formal manner of Van Mierevelt and Van Ravesteyn to a more modern, fashionable style.
Yvette Bruijnen, 2007
References
Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 147-48; Campo Weyerman I, 1729, pp. 377-78; Descamps I, 1753, pp. 402-03; Hofstede de Groot 1889a; Hofstede de Groot in Thieme/Becker XIII, 1920, pp. 331-33; Wassenbergh 1967, pp. 37-40; De Vries 1982, pp. 9-11; Visser/Van der Plaat 1995, pp. 375, 479; De Vries in Turner 1996, XII, p. 233
This monumental group portrait shows the four brothers of Willem I of Orange, better known as William the Silent. From left to right they are Lodewijk (1538-74), Jan the Elder (1536-1606), Adolf (1540-68) and Hendrik (1550-74). All four brothers played an important part in the Dutch Revolt, and three of them fell in battle. Only Jan the Elder died a natural death, and he had numerous descendants, among them the Nassaus of Friesland.
He was the second son of Willem the Rich and Juliana, Countess of Stolberg-Wernigerode. He gave William the Silent considerable financial and political support during the Dutch Revolt. In 1578 he became Stadholder of Gelderland, where he set himself the task of introducing Calvinism. He also devoted his efforts to the realization of the Union of Utrecht. Family and political conflicts forced him to relinquish the stadholdership in 1580, whereupon he returned to Dillenburg, remaining loyal to William. He married three times and had 24 children, among them Willem Lodewijk, the later Stadholder of Friesland.5 For biographical information about the other three brothers see the entries on SK-A-522, SK-A-523 and SK-A-524.
Lunsingh Scheurleer used archival material to make a reconstruction of the painted hall decoration in the Mauritshuis in The Hague, to which he thought this group portrait belonged.6 The problem with that hypothetical provenance from the Mauritshuis is that it renders the traditional and plausible attribution to the workshop of Wybrand de Geest improbable, while the dimensions of the various paintings do not fit the proposed locations. A provenance from the Stadholder’s Court in Leeuwarden is more compelling, for this group portrait is described in an inventory of the court ballroom of c. 1800: ‘The overmantel depicts Jan of Nassau, Adolf of Nassau, Hendrik of Nassau, Lodewijk of Nassau, fallen near Mookerheide in the year 1574’.7 A schematic drawing with a note of the dimensions shows that the painting still had an arched top at the time, and measured some 212 x 141 cm.8 This means that the top was later cut off, which appears to be confirmed by the fact that it is only at the top that there is no visible cusping.9
As De Vries has argued, the group portrait once formed an ensemble with two others depicting other members of the House of Nassau (figs. a-b).10 These can also be attributed to De Geest’s workshop, and are now in the collection of the Fries Museum. This ensemble of three group portraits is probably described in an account of the ballroom of the Frisian Stadholder’s Court written in 1786 as ‘the portraits of the Princely Family, very precisely by leading masters’.11 The ballroom was built in 1734 as an extension to the Court, so it can be assumed that the three group portraits were transferred from an older part of the Court in that year.12 That the three paintings cannot be found in earlier inventories of the Court can be explained by assuming that they were let into the walls.
The three portrait groups thus formed an ancestral gallery which, given the military dress and attributes of the sitters, emphasized the military and political importance of the Nassau family in the Dutch Revolt. De Vries has pointed out that the selection of the sitters in the ensemble amounts to a markedly Frisian programme, and he argues persuasively that the ensemble was probably commissioned by Ernst Casimir, who was Stadholder of Friesland from 1620 to 1632.13 This would explain why Ernst Casimir is one of the few living individuals depicted in the ensemble, while his successor, Hendrik Casimir, is not. In the light of the political situation around 1630, when Ernst Casimir was trying to match himself against the increasingly powerful Frederik Hendrik, it would be logical to place the date of the commission around that year.
One possible prototype for the portrait of Lodewijk is the engraving in J. Orlers’s Geslacht-boom der Graven van Nassav (Family tree of the counts of Nassau), which was published in Leiden in 1616. There are several painted busts of Jan the Elder, such as the one in the Katzenelnbogen series, which could have served as the model (SK-A-538).
The attribution to De Geest was rarely called into question,14 but Wassenbergh’s classification of this as a workshop piece has invariably, and rightly, been followed in the later literature.15 The scale of the full ensemble suggests the participation of studio assistants. The smooth and rather harsh execution of the Rijksmuseum group, particularly in the faces, confirms this suspicion. A preliminary study on paper, possibly autograph, for part of the ensemble is in the Biblioteca Reale in Turin.16
The verses by Joost van den Vondel, ‘O spirit who, in the Frisian Court, gives life to ash and dust’, could allude to the ensemble.17 It is not unlikely that the ensemble acquired a certain celebrity, since as far as is known the decoration of a room with monumental group portraits was unique in the Netherlands. Versions of the Rijksmuseum group portrait were made for other residences of the Nassau family, such as the copy in Schloss Dessau.18 In addition, Jan van Teylingen, a painter in Hoorn, copied the four counts as busts for his series of portraits of members of the House of Nassau and of captains of the North Holland Regiment, for which he was awarded a contract by the Delegated Council in 1638.19
Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 86.
Wassenbergh 1967, pp. 32, 35, no. 30; Dordrecht 1972, p. 52, no. 131; Lunsingh Scheurleer 1979, p. 170; De Vries 1982, pp. 16, 79-82; Mulder-Radetzky 1997, pp. 201-02
1809, p. 94, no. 446 (as Anonymous); 1858, p. 183, no. 403 (as Anonymous, 16th-17th century); 1880, pp. 377-78, no. 434 (as Anonymous, 16th century); 1887, p. 49, no. 390 (as De Geest); 1903, p. 104, no. 963 (as De Geest); 1976, p. 238, no. A 566; 2007, no. 86
Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'workshop of Wybrand de (I) Geest, Group Portrait of the Four Brothers of Willem I, Prince of Orange: Jan (1535-1606), Hendrik (1550-74), Adolf (1540-68) and Lodewijk (1538-74), Counts of Nassau, c. 1630', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6934
(accessed 10 November 2024 14:25:59).