Object data
oil on panel
support: height 35.1 cm × width 26.1 cm
outer size: depth 4 cm (support incl. SK-L-2143)
Willem Eversdijck
Portrait of Cornelis Fransz Eversdijck (1586-1666)
c. 1655
Inscriptions
- signature, bottom right, on the niche: W. Eversdyck. fe.
Technical notes
Support The single, vertically grained oak plank is approx. 0.4 cm thick. The reverse is bevelled on all sides and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1635. The panel could have been ready for use by 1644, but a date in or after 1654 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The single, thin, cream-coloured ground extends over the edges of the support. It consists of white pigment and a few slightly translucent cream-coloured pigment particles, and was applied with diagonal brushstrokes.
Underdrawing Infrared reflectography revealed a few dark lines of an underdrawing in a dry medium, indicating the contours of the face, the facial features and the trompe l’oeil frame. It was followed for the most part, with the exception of the shoulders, which were originally planned slightly lower, and the ear, which was further to the right. In addition, a few unidentified lines that were not included in the final painting run between the ear and the sitter’s left shoulder.
Paint layers The paint extends over the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front, in thin paints applied mostly wet in wet. The figure was left in reserve. The background consists of two layers: the first being a light grey, visible around the contours of the face, and the second a darker grey. The frame was executed first, then the head, which was apparently placed on a beige-grey underpaint, followed by the clothing and the curtain. The grey shadow on the collar was applied on dry, white paint. There are subtle transitions in colour and between light and dark passages. The brushwork is visible, but fine, with slight impasto for the highlights in the face.
Erika Smeenk-Metz, 2024
Scientific examination and reports
- technical report: W. de Ridder / G. Tauber, RMA, 19 August 1997
- paint samples: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, nos. SK-A-992/1-2, 20 March 2010
- technical report: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 20 March 2010
- infrared reflectography: E. Smeenk-Metz, RMA, 20 April 2010
- dendrochronology: P. Klein, RMA, 18 June 2010
Condition
Poor. A crack, approx. 2 cm, runs through the plank and paint in the lower left corner. The lighter paints of the face and collar have become somewhat transparent and coarse, and show white pigment particles. The paint is abraded on the higher parts of the wood grain. There are tiny losses and discoloured retouchings throughout, as well as overpaint in the dark parts of the hair. The thick varnish has yellowed, saturates poorly and remnants of an old, discoloured varnish are apparent.
Provenance
? Commissioned by or for the sitter; ? his son, Cornelis Eversdijck (1624-1658), Goes; ? his son, Johannes Eversdijck (1655-1714), Goes; ? his son, Hubrecht Eversdijck (1694-1751), Goes; his son, Johan Abraham Eversdijck (1748-1807), Goes and Demerara (Guyana); ? his daughter, Susanna Maria Gallup, née Eversdijk (1780-1858), Goes, Demerara and Utrecht; ? her daughter, Mary Elisabeth Eversdijk Gallup (1807-1881), Demerara and Brummen; her daughter, Georgina Wilhelmina Harriet Elouise Balfour van Burleigh, née Cantzlaar (1850-1925), Zutphen; from whom, with SK-A-993 and SK-A-994, fl. 400, to the Dutch Ministry of the Interior, for the museum, 10 March 18851
Object number: SK-A-992
Copyright: Public domain
The artist
Willem Eversdijck (Goes c. 1616/20 - Middelburg 1671)
Willem Eversdijck was born in Goes between 1610 and 1620 as the son of the Catholic painter Cornelis Willemsz Eversdijck. He trained as an artist in Antwerp, and in the 1633-34 financial year he was registered in the ledgers of the city’s Guild of St Luke as a pupil of Cornelis de Vos. He settled in Middelburg in or around 1642 and remained there for the rest of his life. He joined the local Guild of St Luke between 2 February 1652 and 18 April 1653. On 15 June 1653 he married Blasina van Ossewaarde in Goes. His earliest known signed and dated painting is a civic guard piece.2 Eversdijck’s name appears several times in the guild archives, remarkably often for failing to turn up at the funerals of fellow members. The ownership of properties and a loan made to a shipowner suggest that he was reasonably well-off. Eversdijck died in Middelburg and was buried in Goes on 9 March 1671.
Eversdijck worked in several genres, but his extant oeuvre is small. It runs to around 20 paintings and includes several large group portraits, such as that of the members of the St Sebastian Guild of 1665.3 A few of his likenesses are known only from prints. The artist’s one documented pupil was Isaack Jansz Vleeshouwer, who studied with him in 1657-58.
Gerdien Wuestman, 2024
References
P. de la Rue, Geletterd Zeeland: Verdeeld in drie afdeelingen, bevattende in zig de schryvers, geleerden en kunstenaars, uit dien staat geboortig, met bygevoegd levensverhaal der voornaamsten onder dezelve, Middelburg 1734, p. 323; J. van Gool, De nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlantsche kunstschilders en schilderessen: Waer in de levens- en kunstbedryven er tans levende en reets overleedene schilders, die van Houbraken, noch eenig ander schryver, zyn aengeteekend, verhaelt worden, I, The Hague 1750, pp. 43-44; J. Immerzeel Jr, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van het begin der vijftiende eeuw tot heden, I, Amsterdam 1842, p. 226; C. Kramm, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, beeldhouwers, graveurs en bouwmeesters: Van den vroegsten tot op onzen tijd, I, Amsterdam 1857, p. 447; A. Bredius, ‘De gildeboeken van St. Lucas te Middelburg’, in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis: Verzameling van meerendeels onuitgegeven berichten en mededeelingen betreffende Nederlandsche schilders, plaatsnijders, beeldhouwers, bouwmeesters, juweliers, goud- en zilverdrijvers [enz.], VI, Rotterdam 1884-87, pp. 106-264, esp. pp. 186, 191-93, 197, 198, 202, 205, 208, 209; P. Haverkorn van Rijsewijk, ‘De schuttersstukken uit Goes’, in ibid., VII, 1888-90, pp. 166-83, esp. pp. 180-83; Moes and Lilienfeld in U. Thieme and F. Becker (eds.), Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, XI, Leipzig 1915, p. 111; A.W.E. Dek, ‘Het geslacht Eversdijk uit Goes’, Jaarboek van het Centraal Bureau voor Genealogie 27 (1973), pp. 272-93, esp. p. 292; F. van der Ploeg and C.E. Zonnevylle-Heyning, ‘Brave koppen en gladde aengesigten’: De Goese schutters en hun schilders: C.W. Eversdijck, W.C. Eversdijck en P. Peuteman, Middelburg 1999, pp. 111-20; Römer in Saur Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die Bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, XXXV, Munich/Leipzig 2003, p. 423
Entry
Cornelis Fransz Eversdijck was a mathematician and Zeeland’s Master of Accounts. He also held several other public offices, Trustee of Orphans and alderman of his native Goes among them. Here he is wearing a fur-trimmed cloak and is posed against a curtain and framed in a painted stone cartouche decorated in an auricular style.4 Willem Eversdijck, the artist who portrayed him, was his second cousin.5
The work was previously dated around 1665,6 the year before Cornelis Fransz Eversdijck died. That was probably based above all on the correspondences with the 1666 likenesses of his niece Maria Eversdijck and her husband Nicolaes Blanckaert.7 However, an earlier execution is suggested by the slightly impasted execution and the similarities to the artist’s 1656 portrait of Johan de Brune, which is known from a print by Theodor Matham.8
There are two more documented portraits of Cornelis Fransz Eversdijck, at least one of which is a variant of the present panel.9 A likeness of his wife Tanneke Mannee, known only from a record, was probably the companion piece to one of the three paintings of her husband. Mention of a portrait of Cornelis Fransz Eversdijck in the possession of Dignus François Keetlaer, a grandson of his daughter Maria,10 suggests that a version was made for each of the sitter’s children. Jacob Houbraken made a print after the picture owned by Keetlaer, below which there is a verse by the Zeeland historiographer Pieter de la Rue.11
The Rijksmuseum portrait used to belong to a descendant of Cornelis Fransz Eversdijck’s eighth and youngest child. It is not known whether it passed down directly to him,12 but if it did that painting is more likely to be a replica and not the original.
Gerdien Wuestman, 2024
See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements
Literature
F. van der Ploeg and C.E. Zonnevylle-Heyning, ‘Brave koppen en gladde aengesigten’: De Goese schutters en hun schilders: C.W. Eversdijck, W.C. Eversdijck en P. Peuteman, Middelburg 1999, p. 138, no. WE10 (as dated c. 1665)
Collection catalogues
1887, p. 44, no. 3546; 1903, p. 97, no. 914; 1934, p. 97, no. 914; 1976, p. 223, no. A 992
Citation
Gerdien Wuestman, 2024, 'Willem Eversdijck, Portrait of Cornelis Fransz Eversdijck (1586-1666), c. 1655', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8401
(accessed 10 November 2024 12:06:16).