Portrait of David de Moor (1598-1643)

Entry

The name of the sitter, David de Moor, is painted on the reverse of the panel. Because the place of execution, Rotterdam, is inscribed on the front of the panel, an attempt was made in 1970 to identify him with a citizen of that city. However, a search in the Rotterdam baptismal, marriage and burial registers as well as the notarial archives for the period, produced no results.⁹ It can now be established that the sitter was indeed not a citizen of Rotterdam, but of Amsterdam. The present portrait was purchased at the posthumous sale of Carolina Mathilda Henrietta van den Heuvel in 1880.¹⁰ Other portraits in this sale were of Bernard de Moor (1588-1666) and his wife Clara van de Capelle (1607-75), the brother and sister-in-law of the Amsterdam David de Moor. Portraits of his parents, Jacob de Moor (1539-99) and Elisabeth Ruyschenberg (1555-1635), were also included in the sale.¹¹ As can be seen in the reconstruction of the inheritance of the Portrait of David de Moor, Carolina M.H. van den Heuvel was a descendant of Bernard de Moor. This reconstruction finds some additional support in the mention of two other portraits in the 1880 sale catalogue, those of Bernard de Moor II (1641-1719) and his wife, Anna Catharina van den Boogaard (1656-1726).

The youngest of seven children of the surgeon Jacob de Moor, David de Moor was born in Dordrecht on 5 March 1598.¹² He moved with his mother and siblings to Amsterdam sometime after the death of his father in Dordrecht in 1599. The family was apparently Catholic. According to his own account, David de Moor converted to the Reformed faith on 14 May 1612 in the house of the minister Jacobus Trigland, and was baptized in the Nieuwe Kerk by Gosuinus Geldorpius a few days later.¹³ By profession, De Moor was an accountant and merchant dealing in Silesian wool (‘Silesier garen’).¹⁴ David de Moor died in Amsterdam on 28 June 1643. He never married, which explains the orientation of his pose in De Vries’s portrait; if the painting had had a female pendant, De Moor would most likely have been shown turned in three-quarter profile to the viewer’s right, that is, in the opposite direction of how he appears in the museum’s portrait.

David de Moor’s link with Rotterdam was perhaps based on family relations. His sister, Anneken de Moor, was married to the jeweller Aert de Coninck, and among their children were the painters Jacob (1614/15-after 1690) and Philips Koninck (1619-88). David de Moor was not only an uncle of these painters, he became Philips’s guardian after the death of Aert de Coninck in 1639.¹⁵ Both Jacob and Philips Koninck were living in Rotterdam in 1640, which is when David de Moor sat for Abraham de Vries. It is tempting to speculate that it was the wedding of Philips Koninck and Cornelia Furnerius on 1 January 1641 that brought David de Moor to Rotterdam.

The extremely detailed treatment of the present portrait is typical of De Vries’s production in the last decade of his career. The folds of the ruff are meticulously described, and individual hairs of the sitter’s beard and hair have been rendered with a fine brush. The swollen eyelids and somewhat sfumato handling of the face are also characteristic. Sumowski has pointed out the similarities between a painting by De Vries showing a bearded man in fantasy costume with the work of Salomon Koninck.¹⁶ Indeed, the handling of the Portrait of David de Moor also has much in common with Salomon Koninck’s fijnschilder approach.

The identification of the sitter in the present portrait provides circumstantial evidence that Abraham de Vries was in contact with this younger artist during his stay in Amsterdam in the early 1630s. It has long been assumed that Salomon Koninck (1609-56) was related to Jacob and Philips Koninck, although the exact relationship has eluded clarification.¹⁷ Like Jacob and Philips’s father, Aert de Coninck, Salomon’s father, Pieter, was a goldsmith and jeweller in Amsterdam, where he died in 1627.¹⁸ Among the documents suggesting that Salomon Koninck was indeed related to Jacob and Philips is the 1639 inventory of Aert de Coninck’s estate, which was drawn up under Salomon’s supervision.¹⁹ Significantly, as it demonstrates direct contact between the two men, David de Moor, who was appointed executor of Aert de Coninck’s estate, was also present when the inventory was made. It seems quite possible, therefore, that it was an association between Abraham de Vries and Salomon Koninck, and possibly also with Philips and Jacob Koninck, that led David de Moor to commission the present portrait.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

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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. 331.