Portrait of a Male Member of the Van der Borcht Family

c. 1635

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 205 cm × width 136 cm
outer size: depth 8 cm (support incl. frame)
total: weight 36 kg

Inscriptions

coat of arms, indistinct, upper left, on the draped hanging

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: W. de Ridder / L. Nijkamp, RMA, 16 March 2006

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1914: varnished
conservator unknown: ? partial cleaning

Provenance

…; anonymous sale, Paris (Baudouin and J.-B.P. Lebrun), 16 February 1798 sqq., no. 18 (‘ANTOINE VANDICK. Le portrait d’un amiral célèbre du temps, que l’on dit celui de Ruither [i.e. de Ruyter]; il est vu de grandeur naturelle & en pieds; il semble marcher dans son appartement de droite à gauche, la tête de trois quarts sur sa gauche, portant cheveux courts, avec moustache, collet de chemise, appuyant sa main gauche sur son épée, & tenant de la main droite son manteau noir, ainsi que tout son ajustement; il porte encore un poignard dans sa ceinture, du côté droit. Le fond du tableau est occupé par une partie de colonne élevée sur piédestal, un grand rideau rouge porte ses armes d’une manière pittoresque; au bas une table aussi couverte d’un tapis rouge, sur lequel est placé son chapeau; au-dessus, l’on voit la mer près de la côte, où l’on remarque un combat entre un petit & un fort bâtiment, qui paroît être peint par Bonaventure Peterse […] Hauteur 6 pieds 2 po. Largeur 4 pieds 2 po. [199.8 x 135 cm] T.’), frs. 4,900, ? to the dealer Lespinasse de Langeac, comte d’Arlet,¹ or to ‘Coquille’;²…; sale, Hendrik Muilman (1743-1812, Haarlem), Amsterdam (P. van der Schley et al.), 12 April 1813 sqq., no. 44 (‘Dijk (A. van), hoog 81, breed 54 duimen [208.2 x 138.8 cm]. Doek. Een Admiraal of Lid van de Admiraliteit, staande ten voeten uit, bloodhoofds, houdende de regterhand aan het Gevest van zijnen Degen; naast hem zijn Hoed op eene Tafel, in ’t verschiet ziet men Schepen’), bought in at fl. 1,050;³ his son Willem Ferdinand Mogge Muilman (1778-1849), Amsterdam; his wife Magdalena Antonia Muilman (1788-1853), Amsterdam; her daughter Anna Maria van de Poll-Mogge Muilman (1811-78), Amsterdam; her stepson, Jonkheer Jacobus Salomon Hendrik van de Poll (1837-80); by whom bequeathed to the museum, 1880⁴

Object number: SK-A-725

Credit line: Jonkheer J.S.H. van de Poll Bequest, Amsterdam

The artist

Anthony van Dyck (Antwerp 1599 - London 1641)

Anthony van Dyck was baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk, Antwerp, on 22 March 1599, the seventh child of a prosperous haberdasher. He died on 9 December 1641 in Blackfriars, London, and was buried two days later in Saint Paul’s Cathedral. By then he was internationally famous, and had to his credit an oeuvre of well over seven hundred paintings, consisting mostly in portraits, but also some highly esteemed sacred and profane figure subjects. He had outlived Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who had greatly influenced him in his youth, by only some eighteen months, but he was to prove the more widely influential.

Enrolled as a pupil of Hendrik van Balen (1574/1575-1632) in 1609, he became a master in the Antwerp guild of St Luke nine years later before he was eighteen and a week before he received his majority – an event perhaps connected with this father’s financial difficulties which had begun in 1615 and ended with the sale of the family house in 1620, having caused strife in the family. In the meantime, Van Dyck had earlier entered Rubens’s studio, and had perhaps already operated unofficially as an artist working from a house in Antwerp called Den Dom van Ceulen. He was the only one of Rubens’s assistants to be named in the contract for the paintings for the Antwerp Jesuit Church signed on 22 March 1620.

There is no contemporary archival evidence for the existence of a studio functioning for Van Dyck before he left Antwerp for London and Rome. However, statements given in a lawsuit in Antwerp in 1660/1661 and the number of contemporary versions of some of Van Dyck’s works of that time would indicate at the least that there was a group of artists working in Van Dyck’s milieu, however informally.⁵

Van Dyck left Antwerp for London in October 1620; the purpose of his short visit – he was granted permission to leave at the end of the following February – is not known, but he received a payment from King James I (1566-1625) and was expected to return in eight months. He was recorded soon afterwards as living in Rome in the same house as George Gage (c. 1582-1632), an ‘Anglo-Catholic’ employed by the British crown to advance negotiations for the prince of Wales’s ‘Spanish match’ at the papal court.⁶

In Italy, Van Dyck was active in Rome, Venice, Genoa and Palermo.⁷ He re-established himself in 1627 in Antwerp, and was appointed court painter to the governor of the Spanish Netherlands, the Archduchess Isabella (1566-1633); his practice extended to The Hague whence he was summoned on two occasions.

By the summer of 1632, Van Dyck had settled in London; he was knighted by King Charles I (1600-1649) and then granted an annual pension as a retainer. But in the spring of 1634, he was in Antwerp and by the end of the year he was living in Brussels. By March 1635 he had returned to London and was established in a studio, specially converted by the architect Inigo Jones (1573-1652), on the Thames at Blackfriars. In great demand, not only by the king as a portrait painter, Van Dyck mixed with members of the court and married in 1640 Mary Ruthven, who was of a Scots noble family. In the autumn of 1640 he was in Antwerp, and early in 1641 briefly in Paris whence he returned hoping to gain the patronage of King Louis XIII (1601-1643) and Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642). There in November, he wrote that he was very unwell; back in London with his wife for her lying-in, he died shortly after the birth of his daughter, Justiniana.

References
S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, pp. 1-12

Entry

Beneath the discoloured varnish, the coat of arms depicted on the hanging beside the column in the present picture is barely visible today, but can be made out in photographs as being identical (though the colours are invisible to the naked eye) to that on SK-A-101, as was recognized in the 1903 museum catalogue (the sitters had already been assigned the same, correct patronym). It is of the Van der Borcht family of Flanders: ‘D’Argent au chevron d’azur, chargé de trois mâcles d’or’.⁸ In the distance, a three-master, flying a flag at the main of a white saltire against a blue field, is running before the wind beside a lateen rigged two master before a wooded cliff.

Lebrun in the 1798 sale catalogue had already recognized that the distant view was by another hand, as did also the 1960 museum catalogue. That apart, the picture has always been accepted as the work of Anthony van Dyck, although reservations have been expressed by the present author.⁹ Because of the discoloured varnish, the brushwork is difficult to assess, but in areas of partial, but unrecorded (?) cleaning – of the face, hands, ruff and cuffs – it seems no more than competent. The demeanour of the sitter has none of the refined elegance associated with Van Dyck after his return from Italy. A point of comparison is the Munich full-length Portrait of a Man¹⁰ beside which it seems inferior; the head is also less well painted than that in the other Van der Borcht portrait (SK-A-101). Such being the case an attribution to a follower of Van Dyck seems justified.

Lebrun attributed the distant view to Bonaventura Peeters (1614-1652); the 1960 museum catalogue suggested Andries van Ertvelt (1590-1652). Neither attribution is acceptable; the hand responsible seems undistinguished and remains unidentified. Since 1911, it has been suggested that the view is perhaps of Dover castle, the nearest port on a rocky shore to the Flemish seaboard. But there is no evidence to substantiate this especially as no white cliffs are visible.

Both Van der Borcht portraits in the Rijksmuseum are unusual for several reasons, not least their both containing the same coat of arms. As no family tree of this family has been traced, it is pointless to speculate about the Christian name of the sitter in this work. Why he was called François in the 1903 museum catalogue and subsequently, sometimes with qualification, is a mystery. Baetens records a François van der Borcht as a merchant trading in Bilbao, circa 1650 (see also under SK-A-101),¹¹ but his relationship with Adriaan – the likely sitter in SK-A-101 – is unknown. Glück, followed by Vey, believed that the present portrait was painted before SK-A-101, and dated it to 1627 or 1628;¹² the museum catalogues of 1934 and 1960 date it circa 1628. The costume in the two pictures is very similar and can be dated to the 1630s. It seems probable that the sitter in the present picture is the younger of the two, in which case he may well be a son of Adriaan van der Borcht.

The two portraits entered the Rijksmuseum from different sources, but Vey speculates as to whether they might have been painted as pendants because of their having so many features in common. It would have been most unusual for father and son, even if at the time neither was married, to be so depicted. But as he believes that some years separated the execution of the two works, he concluded that ‘they were presumably intended to be hung together’.

If the date of the patent of Adriaan’s nobility of 2 March 1633 is acceptable as a terminus post quem, it seems more likely that the portrait of (?) Adriaan (SK-A-101) was painted first: the head by Van Dyck in 1634/35 and the rest of the figure soon after; the present portrait might then have been executed as the son and heir of the newly ennobled family.

Another unusual feature of both the Van der Borcht portraits is the backgrounds, painted by different hands. In only one or two other extant portraits by Van Dyck from his ‘second’ Antwerp period is this the case; Vey suggested that Van Dyck may not have been present when the background view in one of these – the full-length Equestrian Portrait of the Prince of Arenberg and Barbançon at Holkham Hall, Norfolk – was executed.¹³ The background views in the Rijksmuseum portraits may well refer to the shipping interests of the sitters; what appears to be a sea skirmish in the present picture can be taken as a reference to this sitter’s martial propensities, seemingly alluded to by the sword and the short sword at his waistband. However, the sitter is not wearing combat dress, but civilian attire typical of the richer classes. The sword may rather refer to his noble status, while the short sword seems unprecedented in Van Dyck’s oeuvre. Also unusual is the motif of the sitter’s hat placed on the table. While helmets and crowns are so placed in Van Dyck’s oeuvre, the hat only appears on one other occasion, in a portrait which Glück attributed to him but which has been rejected by Vey.¹⁴

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

Vey in S.J. Barnes, N. de Poorter, O. Millar and H. Vey, Anthony van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven (Conn.)/London 2004, no. III.73

Collection catalogues

1880, p. 501, no. 470a (as A. van der Borcht); 1887, p. 39, no. 306; 1903, p. 91, no. 854 (as François van der Borcht); 1904, p. 110, no. 854 (as François (?) van der Borcht); 1911, p. 128, no. 854 (with a view of Dover (?) castle); 1934, p. 90, no. 854 (dated c. 1628); 1960, p. 91, no. 854 (seascape possibly by A. van Ertvelt); 1976, p. 208, no. A 725 (as Portrait of a Man from the Van der Borcht family, perhaps François van der Borcht)

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'follower of Anthony van Dyck, Portrait of a Male Member of the Van der Borcht Family, c. 1635', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7001

(accessed 19 September 2024 17:59:39).