Portrait of Joannes Putkamer (1600-1671) on his Deathbed

1671

Object data

oil on canvas

support: height 66.7 cm × width 81.7 cm × thickness 3.6 cm (support incl. protective backboard)
outer size: depth 10 cm (support incl. frame)

Inscriptions

signature and date, lower right (H and B ligated): HBloemaert fe: / A° 1671
inscription, lower right: Aetat. 71 / Sacerd.46

Technical notes

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been preserved and there are selvedges at the top and bottom. Slight cusping is visible on all sides, most clearly at the bottom and on the right.
Preparatory layers The double ground extends over the tacking edges and almost up to the selvedges. The first, orange-red layer consists of earth pigments and bright red and black pigment particles. The second ground is a warm grey containing lead white particles, black pigment particles and some earth pigments.
Underdrawing Stereomicroscopy revealed a dark underdrawing in paint (not visible with infrared photography) under the background layer around the contours of the hands. No further information could be obtained with infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint does not extend over the tacking edges. The figure was reserved in the first layer of the background, whereas the second overlaps the painted figure. The grey ground serves as a mid-tone in the costume, pillow and bed. The paint was generally smoothly applied, wet in wet, with very careful blending, in many cases even in the contours of adjoining areas. Deep shadows in the face and hands were defined with a dark glaze that was also often added wet in wet with adjacent colours (for example in the eyelashes and the surrounding flesh paint).
Gwen Tauber, 2022

Scientific examination and reports

infrared photography: G. Tauber, RMA, 29 August 2008
paint samples: G. Tauber, RMA, nos. SK-A-735/1-2, 29 August 2008
technical report: G. Tauber, RMA, 29 August 2008

Condition

Fair. There is a pronounced crack pattern throughout. The thin, grey paint of the collar is abraded. Countless metal soap protrusions have occurred throughout.

Provenance

…; donated by the conservator Willem Anthonij Hopman (1828-1910), Amsterdam, to the museum, 1882

Object number: SK-A-735

Credit line: Gift of W.A. Hopman, Amsterdam

The artist

Hendrick Bloemaert (Utrecht 1601/02 - Utrecht 1672)

It emerges from an annuity bought for Hendrick Bloemaert in 1610 that he was born in Utrecht in 1601 or 1602 as the eldest son of the Catholic artist Abraham Bloemaert and Gerarda de Roij. Hendrick trained with his father, as reported by Houbraken. That apprenticeship, though, is not recorded in the guild books, but there was no obligation for the sons of members to pay registration fees. Bloemaert was in Rome on 27 February 1627, where he witnessed the foundation of a Norbertine convent by the Utrecht priest Johannes Honorius van Axel de Seny. It is not known how long he stayed in Italy, but he was back in Utrecht in 1631, for on 1 October he married Margareta van der Eem, the daughter of Cornelis van der Eem, a Catholic lawyer.

Bloemaert enlisted as an independent master with Utrecht’s Guild of St Luke on some date between 25 January 1630 and 25 January 1633. He was elected dean in 1643, and it was in that capacity that he was probably jointly responsible in February of that year for the grant of an ordinance formalizing the independence of the painters, who had parted company with the sculptors and woodcarvers in 1639. The prominent role that Bloemaert played in the affairs of the Utrecht painters is reflected in his re-election to the guild’s board in 1655 and 1656, and then annually from 1659 to 1664.

Bloemaert never knew financial adversity, and invested his wealth in houses and land. He was also a published writer, first of poetry and then, in 1650, of his translation of Battista Guarini’s pastoral play Il pastor fido (Den getrouwen herder). It is preceded by an ode in which Joost van den Vondel sang the praises of his literary work and his painting. In 1670 Bloemaert’s translation of L’Annibale in Capua by N. Beregan or Berengani was issued (Hannibal den manhaften veld-overste triomferende in de stadt Capua). He was buried in Utrecht’s Jacobikerk on 30 December 1672, at the end of the Dutch ‘year of disasters’. The fact that he was the only member of the Bloemaert dynasty to be given a Catholic funeral was due to the French occupation of the country, which created a brief opportunity for Catholics to profess their faith openly.

Bloemaert’s earliest dated pictures, St Jerome and St John the Baptist, are from 1624.¹ Initially he focused on single-figured genre scenes related to the repertoire of the Utrecht Caravaggisti and his father. In the mid-1630s the accent shifted towards portraiture and more Classicist mythological and religious subjects that can be associated with work by artists like Gerard van Honthorst, Jan van Bijlert and Jan van Bronckhorst. A few later altarpieces were probably made for Catholic patrons in Utrecht and Amersfoort. In contrast to his father, his activities were mainly local and regional. There are no known major commissions from Flanders. Bloemaert’s last dated painting is the Portrait of Joannes Putkamer on his Deathbed of 1671.²

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022

References
J. von Sandrart, Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675: Leben der berühmten Maler, Bildhauer und Baumeister, ed. A.R. Peltzer, Munich 1925 (ed. princ. Nuremberg 1675), p. 165; A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, I, Amsterdam 1718, p. 44; S. Muller, Schilders-vereenigingen te Utrecht: Bescheiden uit het Gemeente-Archief, Utrecht 1880, pp. 120, 128-31, 134; Moes in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, IV, Leipzig 1910, pp. 127-28; Bok in A. Blankert and L.J. Slatkes (eds.), Nieuw licht op de Gouden Eeuw: Hendrick ter Brugghen en zijn tijdgenoten, exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum)/Braunschweig (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) 1986-87, pp. 218-19; Bok in M.G. Roethlisberger and M.J. Bok, Abraham Bloemaert and his Sons: Paintings and Prints, I, Doornspijk 1993, pp. 588-607 (documents); Seelig in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XI, Munich/Leipzig 1995, pp. 550-51; G. Seelig, Abraham Bloemaert (1566-1651): Studien zur Utrechter Malerei um 1620, Berlin 1997, pp. 270-74, 308-09

Entry

Hendrick Bloemaert concentrated on portraits and large religious works after around 1640, among them several altarpieces that were very probably made for clandestine Catholic churches and chapels.³ His clients included fellow Catholics, academics, officials and the nobility.⁴ The present likeness is the second one that Bloemaert made of the Utrecht priest Joannes Putkamer. The first can be dated around 1650 from an estimate of the sitter’s apparent age, but is only known from a print by Theodoor Matham.⁵ The one in the Rijksmuseum was painted shortly after Putkamer’s death on 23 June 1671. The inscription at lower right reads ‘Aetat. 71 Sacerd.46’, so gives the deceased’s age as well as the years of his priesthood. Dirkse has pointed out that Putkamer must have been ordained around 1625, after having trained in Louvain.⁶ He then held the post of visitator of the Franciscan nuns in Huissen and Almelo and of the Augustinian nuns in Emmerich. In 1632 Rovenius, the vicar apostolic, appointed him priest of St Nicolaas Achter de Wal, one of the four missions within the city walls of Utrecht, where he served for the rest of his life. In 1635 he was designated as a canon of the Chapterhouse of St Peter. He was a counsellor to the successive vicars apostolic Rovenius, De La Torre and Van Neercassel. Putkamer lived in Lollestraat, behind the ramparts, close to Hendrick Bloemaert’s house in Lange Jufferstraat.⁷ The portrait may have been commissioned by the priest’s church, where it could have remained until the parish was abolished in 1797.⁸

There are around ten seventeenth-century likenesses of clergymen laid out for burial,⁹ and Bloemaert could have found examples in Utrecht in Willem Moreelse’s deathbed portrait of the priest Jacob van Schendel (1650) and Dick van Voorst’s of Henricus van Eck (1651).¹⁰ The present one of Joannes Putkamer displays the usual iconographic elements of the genre. The priest is shown half-length, lying with his head on a cushion, his eyes closed and wearing vestments. He also has a biretta on his head. Unlike earlier examples, though, he is not clasping a chalice or a crucifix; his hands are simply joined in prayer.¹¹ Bloemaert may have borrowed this motif and the biretta from the print of the deceased Catholic priest Nicolaes Nomius lying on a sumptuous tomb that Hendrick’s brother Cornelis made after a design by Pieter de Grebber.¹²

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

Literature

M.G. Roethlisberger and M.J. Bok, Abraham Bloemaert and his Sons: Paintings and Prints, I, Doornspijk 1993, p. 502, no. H 144; P. Dirkse, ‘“En ging gerust te bedt, om vrolijck op te staen in’t ander leven”: Doodsportretten van Noord-Nederlandse geestelijken 1625-1750’, in B.C. Sliggers (ed.), Naar het lijk: Het Nederlandse doodsportret 1500-heden, exh. cat. Haarlem (Teylers Museum) 1998, pp. 116-46, esp. pp. 141-42, 213

Collection catalogues

1886, p. 9, no. 38a; 1887, p. 16, no. 125; 1903, p. 52, no. 528; 1976, p. 121, no. A 735

Citation

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2022, 'Hendrick Bloemaert, Portrait of Joannes Putkamer (1600-1671) on his Deathbed, 1671', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.6072

(accessed 23 November 2024 19:02:22).