Object data
oil on panel
support: height 73.9 cm × width 59.5 cm
outer size: depth 6 cm (support incl. frame)
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp
Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (1585-1672)
1651
Inscriptions
- signature, date and inscription, and inscribed, lower left (J and G ligated): Ætatis. 66 / JG cuyp. fecit / 1651.
Technical notes
The support is composed of three vertically grained oak planks and is slightly bevelled at the top and bottom. The ground colour is white. The paint layers were applied quite smoothly, with little visible brushmarking.
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 28 September 2004
Condition
Fair. The join has separated slightly at the top of the panel and there is a crack measuring approximately 6 cm at the upper left.
Conservation
- M. Zeldenrust, 1979: old wood worm holes filled; retouched and revarnished
Provenance
? The sitter’s brother, Louis de Geer (1587-1652), with pendant; ? by inheritance, with pendant, to Egbert Lintelo de Geer (1822-87), Zeist; sale, Gillis van der Voort (†) et al., Amsterdam (C.P. Roos and C.P. Roos Jr.), 13 March 1877, no. 3, fl. 104, to the museum, through the mediation of the dealer, Frederik Muller1
Object number: SK-A-611
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp (Dordrecht 1594 - Dordrecht 1652)
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp was baptized in December 1594 in Dordrecht. His father, the glass-painter Gerrit Gerritsz, was presumably his first teacher. Cuyp entered the Guild of St Luke in Dordrecht in 1617 and served as its bookkeeper in 1629, 1633, 1637 and 1641. According to Houbraken, he was one of the leaders of the fine art painters in their separation from the guild in 1642. His first extant painting, a portrait of the masters of the Holland mint,2 is from 1617, the same year that he joined the guild. His other public commissions were for a group portrait of the second company of the arquebusiers’ civic guard from around 16253 and the 1630 Allegory of the Capture of the City of ’s-Hertogenbosch,4 which was most likely painted for either Frederik Hendrik or a government body. In 1618, Cuyp married Aertken van Cooten from Utrecht. Significantly, Cuyp’s work from the mid-1620s onward shows the influence of Utrecht painters, especially that of Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651) with whom, according to Houbraken, Cuyp studied.
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp was the most important portraitist in Dordrecht in the first half of the 17th century. In addition to portraits, which make up approximately two-thirds of his extant oeuvre, he painted histories, genre pieces and still lifes. Among his numerous pupils were his half-brother Benjamin Cuyp (1612-52), his son Aelbert (1620-91), and probably Ferdinand Bol (1616-80) and Paulus Lesire (1612-c. 1654/56) as well. His last dated painting, Boy with a Wineglass, is from 1652.5 In a document from the same year, Aertken van Cooten is mentioned as the painter’s widow.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Houbraken I, 1718, pp. 237-38; Veerman 1977, pp. 16-17; Chong in Turner 1996, VIII, p. 291; Seelig in Saur XXIII, 1999, p. 239; Chong 2002a, pp. 202-04 (documents)
Entry
Born in Liège in 1583, Margaretha de Geer moved with her family to Aachen in 1595, and then to Dordrecht. In 1603, she married the Dordrecht merchant Jacob Trip (1575-1661), whose brother Elias was in business with her brother Louis. Together, the Trip and De Geer families made fortunes in, among other things, iron mining and the arms trade.
Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp and Jacob Trip both served as elders in the Walloon Church in Dordrecht, and the artist painted pendant portraits of Trip and his wife for the first time in 1649.6 Like the 1649 Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, the Rijksmuseum painting from two years later shows the sitter at bust-length and without hands. This compositional type was the one most often employed by Cuyp.7 Margaretha’s dress, including the by then already old-fashioned millstone ruff, and the lighting are virtually identical in both paintings. However, the pose in the Rijksmuseum portrait differs somewhat from the one of 1649, as Margaretha’s face is shown more in profile. Cuyp may have made this slight alteration in Margaretha’s pose in order to create a greater sense of unity between this portrait and its pendant. The latter painting is undoubtedly the Portrait of Jacob Trip, now in a private collection in the United States (fig. a), which is also dated 1651 and was together with the Rijksmuseum Portrait of Margaretha de Geer until they were sold at auction in 1877. Significantly, the Portrait of Jacob Trip in a private collection differs from the 1649 Portrait of Jacob Trip in much the same way, that is the sitter in this portrait is oriented more towards his partner. In the 1651 Portrait of Jacob Trip, Cuyp achieved this effect by including the sitter’s hands.
Another Portrait of Margaretha de Geer8 is also dated 1651, and was considered an autograph work by, among others, Hofstede de Groot, who once owned it, and Chong.9 Judging from photographs, this portrait appears to replicate the Rijksmuseum picture rather than vice versa.
In addition to the six portraits by Jacob and Aelbert Cuyp of Margaretha de Geer and Jacob Trip, all executed within a very short space of time, there are at least eight portraits and replicas of these sitters dating between 1655 and 1669 by Nicolaes Maes,10 as well as a pendant pair and a portrait of Margaretha de Geer alone by Rembrandt.11 Hofstede de Groot surmised that the Dordrecht couple had so many portraits made of themselves as gifts for their children.12 The present painting, however, was probably not given to one of their children, but to Margaretha’s brother Louis de Geer as a 19th-century owner of the portrait, Egbert Lintelo de Geer (1822-87), was a descendant of Louis.
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. 54.
Literature
Hofstede de Groot 1928, p. 256, no. 2; Chong 1992, p. 541, no. JC63; Ekkart 2002b, p. 36; Giepmans in Dordrecht 2002, p. 158, no. 38; Chong 2002b, p. 184, no. 104, with earlier literature
Collection catalogues
1886, p. 18, no. 67b (as Portrait of a Woman); 1887, p. 33, no. 258 (as Portrait of a Woman); 1903, p. 79, no. 754; 1934, p. 79, no. 754; 1976, p. 185, no. A 611; 2007, no. 54
Citation
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp, Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (1585-1672), 1651', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8200
(accessed 15 November 2024 05:35:07).