Twins in Swaddling-Clothes: the Children of Jacob de Graeff and Aeltge Boelens, who Died in Infancy

Entry

This soberly executed painting displays the portraits of the swaddled twins of Jacob Dircksz de Graeff (1571-1638) and his wife Aeltge Boelens (1579-1620), who according to the inscription were born on 7 April 1617. At top right and left are the father’s coat of arms, and since neither of them is a lozenge the children may both have been boys.⁶

Although the babies are shown with their eyes open, without any funerary attributes or vanitas symbolism, this painting is rightly regarded as a death portrait.⁷ Dead children were usually portrayed lying on their deathbed,⁸ but in a group portrait of the so-called Dordrecht quadruplets of 1621, three of the children are depicted in the same way as in the Rijksmuseum picture: erect, wrapped in swaddling-clothes and with their eyes open.⁹

According to the inscriptions, those three children died within a few days, but the one that died 90 minutes after birth is shown lying on her deathbed. The biographical data on the De Graeff family confirm that these are twins who died soon after birth. Jacob Dircksz de Graeff had five children who reached adulthood, and they were all born before 1617.¹⁰ The archives also reveal that on 9 April 1617, Jan, son of De Graeff and Boelens, was baptized in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam, and then on 11 April a ‘child of De Graeff’ was buried in the same church.¹¹ It is likely that the other child was stillborn or died almost immediately after birth, and cannot be found in the archives for that reason.

The baby on the left has a rather ruddy face, while the one on the right is remarkably pale. This difference in colour is a symptom of twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome, a serious condition that can have fatal consequences, and it was recently suggested that the De Graeff twins died as a result of it.¹² Another possibility is that the painter used the difference in colour to distinguish Jan from his twin brother, who had died before him.

The sober execution gives this portrait the nature of a historical document for future generations, in this case of a prominent Amsterdam family.¹³ The portrait can be dated around 1617, the year given in the inscription. No attribution can be made for the time being.

Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 418.