Feigned Sculpted Bust of the Blessed Hieronymus Werdanus Set in a Feigned Stone Cartouche, Decorated with a Swag and Two Bunches of Flowers

Entry

This work jointly signed by Wouter Gysaerts and David Teniers II (1610-1690) was one of a series of nineteen portraying the so-called martyrs of Gorcum. Seven others are extant, offered in recent anonymous sales: two in London at Christie’s in 1963 and 1971, three on the Paris art market, 1994; one in Budapest in 2011, and another in London (Bonham’s) in 2015.⁹ The configuration of the cartouches and arrangement of the flowers differ in each.

No other signed works by Gysaerts are known. He used the Latin form for his Christian name in this signature preceded by an ‘F’ for Frater and succeeded by ‘MIN’ for Minor. The series appears to be the only instance in which Teniers collaborated in this type of devotional painting, which had probably been developed by Daniel Seghers (1590-1661) in Antwerp from the late 1630s.¹⁰

From the evidence of Seghers’s catalogue of his output, it appears that he extended his speciality of flower still lifes to cartouches supplied to him together with a central motif filling the picture niche.¹¹ Whether this came to be normal practice is difficult to establish as there exist cartouches decorated with flowers in which the central portion has not been filled in.¹² It seems likely that the cartouche was itself normally the work of an anonymous specialist, and this was probably the case in the present work. It is to be assumed that Teniers executed the feigned bust in the niche of the cartouche that was supplied to him and then passed the canvas to Gysaerts, who was presumably active in the friary in Mechelen.

As stated in the Provenance, Descamps recorded that Teniers painted the nineteen martyrs of Gorcum at the request of his son (i.e. Antoon, baptized on 12 June 1648), who was indeed a member of the Mechelen friary;¹³ Vlieghe elaborated on the identification of the Rijksmuseum picture with this commission.¹⁴ The names inscribed on the feigned busts are among those of the Franciscan friars hanged on the orders of Guillaume de la Marck, Lord of Lumey, leader of the Calvinist Sea Beggars (Watergeuzen), in a barn of a sacked monastery outside Den Briel on 9 July 1572.¹⁵ Eight other Catholic clerics were also executed for refusing to renounce the authority of the pope and the doctrine of the real presence in the Eucharist. The gruesome events, that began with the capture of the citadel of Gorcum, in which the friars and religious had taken refuge on 26 June 1572, were recounted by Rutger, the nephew of the guardian of the Franciscan friary and a witness to the early events, to his brother Willem van Est (Guglielmus Estius), whose Historiae Martyrum Gorcomiensium … 1572 was published in Douai in 1603.¹⁶

Hearings for the canonisation of the nineteen began in 1619 in the southern Netherlands.¹⁷ On 24 November 1675 Pope Clement X celebrated the martyrs’ beatification in Rome.¹⁸ Long before, in 1615, their bones had been exhumed and taken to Brussels, from where they were distributed among Franciscan friaries in the southern Netherlands one of which was that in Mechelen.¹⁹ In the museum painting the sitter’s name in the inscription is preceded by a ‘B’ for Beatus, for the martyrs were not canonised until 1867 and therefore until then bore the title ‘blessed’. As the series was installed on 9 July 1676, it can be safely concluded that it was executed in the first half of that year.²⁰

Hieronymus, whose sculpted bust Teniers depicted in the present painting, wears a friar’s habit and a noose about his neck (as do five of the other friars in the paintings listed above) in reference to the manner of his execution. Van Est described him as a native of Weert in the county of Horne and stated that he was about fifty at the time of his death. He was known as the pilgrim or knight of Jerusalem because of his previous service in the Franciscan friary in the Holy City, whence he had returned to his native town by 1549.²¹ He was appointed vicarius (vicar) at Gorcum in 1570.²² As his nickname of knight suggests, he may have been a member of a noble family whose coat of arms is on the socle. The arms (rendered in grisaille) – De gueules à la croix d’argent, cantonné de quatre croisettes pattées du même – are those of the Vercleren or Van der Cleren family of Brabant.²³

Van Est recorded that Hieronymus was especially close to the guardian of the friary. His defiance was demonstrated by his kicking the Calvinist minister who exhorted him to renounce his faith as he mounted the ladder to the makeshift gallows. The prototype used by Teniers to render his features has not been identified; it may have been the engraving of circa 1617-18 by Jacob Matham I (1571-1631), although there the face is fuller and the tonsure is complete.²⁴

Gregory Martin, 2022