Group Portrait in a Landscape

Entry

Sometimes referred to in the past as a portrait of a family,⁴ the present painting can be better described as a portrait of a horse and three children with servants. The horse is shown prominently in the centre of the composition. Judging from her apparel, the woman holding the youngest child is not the mother of the three children, but a nurse. Of the three men shown close to the children, only the clothing of the one in the middle, behind the coach, suggests a man of patrician standing. His inconspicuous placement, however, makes his identification as the children’s father and commissioner of the portrait unlikely. Although shown wearing a dress, the fact that the gold chain hangs diagonally across the youngest child’s chest may indicate that it is a boy rather than a girl, as the latter are most often shown wearing chains around their necks.⁵ Unfortunately, it has not been possible to identify the children in the present portrait.

A note written by the collector Adriaan van der Hoop, who acquired the picture in 1832, could provide a starting point for further research; Van der Hoop recorded in 1838 that ‘a reliable man’ had informed him that the painting came from the Glimmer family, one of the portrayed children being the grandmother of the last deceased Mr Glimmer.⁶ Whether Van der Hoop’s ‘reliable man’ was actually all that reliable should, however, be doubted, as according to this source the original bill for the painting from its maker, ‘A. Cuyp’, was still in the possession of the family.⁷ The painting can definitely not be attributed to Aelbert Cuyp.

When the painting was auctioned in 1832 it carried an attribution to Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp. Except for a period in the 19th century in which Van der Hoop considered it to be a work by Aelbert Cuyp, the Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp attribution was maintained in the literature until Chong rightly rejected it in 2002.⁸ Indeed, while portraits of children – often fondling a sheep – in landscape settings were something of a speciality of Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, the figure and landscape style of the present portrait do not suggest his hand. Based on the dendrochronological results and the sitters’ costumes, a dating to the end of the 1630s would be appropriate.

Jonathan Bikker, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

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. 443.