Portrait of Pieter Schout (1640-69)

Entry

Rightly considered a masterpiece in his oeuvre, this is one of four equestrian portraits De Keyser executed in the early 1660s.³ In all four works the rider, or riders in the case of a painting in Dresden, are shown from a relatively low viewpoint, monumentally set off against the sky. The small scale of these works contrasts with the much larger equestrian portraits produced by Aelbert Cuyp, Paulus Potter and Rembrandt. Of De Keyser’s four equestrian portraits from the 1660s, the Portrait of Pieter Schout is the only one painted on copper. The size of the copper plate is also remarkable. There are five other portraits by De Keyser executed on copper, but all are small paintings. The copper support of the Rijksmuseum painting permitted an extremely detailed rendering of the sitter and his horse, a black Andalusian.⁴ Especially striking is the thick impasto handling of such costume elements as the lion’s head surmounting the sword and the embroidered scabbard. De Keyser’s use of thick paint in these areas, as well as the vegetation, lends the work a relief-like quality.

De Keyser’s monogram was discovered by Victor de Stuers in 1880.⁵ Before this, John Smith had attributed the figure first to Caspar Netscher and later to Gerard ter Borch, while he believed Philips Wouwerman to have been responsible for the horse and landscape.⁶ After the discovery of the monogram, the notion that the landscape was painted by another artist persisted, Schneider’s attribution of it in 1927 to Adriaen van de Velde being followed in the subsequent literature.⁷ As Adams has pointed out, however, there is no reason to doubt that De Keyser was solely responsible for the painting.⁸

The sitter’s identity is known from the inscription added to the third state of Abraham Blooteling’s print after the painting.⁹ The inscription informs us, among other things, of Pieter Schout’s precise date of birth (14 September 1640) and death (29 May 1669), as well as his function as high bailiff of Hagestein.

Beginning with Meijer in 1888, a number of scholars have suggested that De Keyser’s portrait commemorates Schout’s participation in a cavalcade that accompanied Willem III, Prince of Orange, and his mother Mary Stuart during their ceremonial procession in Amsterdam in the summer of 1660, the year in which the painting was executed.¹⁰ Van Luttervelt claimed that Schout wears the costume he had put on for the cavalcade, and pointed to the allusions to the House of Orange in a poem Jan Vos wrote on De Keyser’s painting shortly after its execution.¹¹ The relevant lines in translation are: ‘Thus people saw Schout when he set out to help the House of Orange. / He does not have to yield to Castor in the way he handles a horse. / He who wants to meet the court ought to excel in everything. / He shows himself ready to use the glittering sword, / And brave pistol when it is necessary’.¹² Doubt was cast on this hypothesis by Adams, who argued that Schout was not mentioned as a participant in the cavalcade and that De Keyser’s portrait contains no references to it.¹³ Instead, Adams referred to the horse’s pose, a pesade, which she viewed as a ‘traditional image of rulership’.¹⁴ In light of this pose, Adam’s argued that Schout’s appointment as high bailiff of Hagestein is commemorated in the portrait. Others have also implied that De Keyser’s portrait shows Schout in this function.¹⁵

The notion that the portrait commemorates Pieter Schout’s appointment as high bailiff of Hagestein can be definitively put to rest. The drost or high bailiff functioned as the chairman of Hagestein’s court of law, and was appointed by the chapters of the cathedral and Oud Munster of Utrecht, under which jurisdiction the Domain of Hagestein fell since 1510. It is for this reason that Schout was sometimes called, as in the dedication of Johannes Neuye’s 1664 play Eneas of Vader des Vaderlants, warden of the cathedral and Oud Munster. Schout graduated from Leiden university with a law degree in 1662.¹⁶ Records in the judicial archive of Hagestein clearly show that Hendrick van Westrenen was high bailiff in 1660.¹⁷ Schout took over the function from him on 3 September 1664.¹⁸ While Schout was certainly not high bailiff of Hagestein when De Keyser portrayed him, Adam’s claim that there is no evidence of his participation in the cavalcade that accompanied Willem III is incorrect. The names of the 108 participants, including that of Pieter Schout, are included in the margin of a print made of the cavalcade.¹⁹

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. 162.