Portrait of a Man, possibly Reijnier Pauw (1591-1676)

Entry

The female pendant to the present portrait was lost in a fire at Kasteel Broekhuizen in Leersum on 5 October 1906. The earliest mention of the pair in the collection of the Pauw family occurs in a manuscript catalogue from around the middle of the 19th century, at which time the sitters were identified as Reijnier Reijniersz Pauw (1591-1676) and his wife Clara Alewijn (1600-30).⁵ Reijnier Pauw was a member of the Council of State between 1621 and 1655, and from 1655 until his death president of the Supreme Court. In a 1905 catalogue of the same collection, the sitters were for the first time given the names of Reijnier’s brother Michiel Pauw (1590-1640) and his wife Hillegonda Spiegel (1599-1677).⁶

The identification of the man’s portrait as Michiel Pauw was accepted by all subsequent scholars until Wolleswinkel argued in 1993 and 1994 for reinstating the older identification.⁷ The resemblance between the man in Moreelse’s painting and a substantiated portrait of Michiel Pauw from around 1620 is slight. Another reason for excluding Michiel Pauw as a candidate is the fact that he became a knight in the Order of St Mark in 1623 and the man in Moreelse’s portrait is not shown wearing a medal.⁸

According to Wolleswinkel, the man in Moreelse’s portrait resembles Reijnier Pauw as he was portrayed later in life in an engraving from 1658 by Theodor Matham after Jan Mijtens.⁹ Wolleswinkel also suggests that the present portrait and its now lost pendant were the ones showing Reijnier Pauw and his wife listed in the 1637 estate inventory of Clara Alewijn’s father Dirck Alewijn and the 1665 inventory of her brother Frederik Alewijn. Wolleswinkel’s identification, however, is far from certain, as the resemblance between Moreelse’s sitter and the man portrayed in Matham’s engraving can be questioned. The 1637 and 1665 inventories, moreover, do not list the artist who painted the portraits, and it cannot be demonstrated that it was those portraits that had entered the collection of the Pauw family by the middle of the 19th century.¹⁰ An argument against Wolleswinkel’s identification, according to Domela Nieuwenhuis, is the fact that Reijnier Pauw lived in The Hague in 1625 and does not appear to have had any contacts with Utrecht.¹¹ Be this as it may, it cannot be demonstrated that any member of the Pauw family had contacts with Utrecht around 1625.¹² As no other member of the Pauw family is a likely candidate, Wolleswinkel’s identification of the sitter as Reijnier Pauw should be retained, at least as a possibility.

There are four extant three-quarter length portrait pairs by Moreelse from 1625.¹³ The male sitters are all shown in a similar manner. In the Portrait of a Member of the Strick Family (Dirck Strick?),¹⁴ the composition is identical to that of the present portrait: the sitter holds a pair of gloves in his right hand and his left hand is pressed into his side. In both portraits he is shown beside a table, upon which his hat has been laid. The bright red tablecloth in the Portrait of a Member of the Strick Family makes for a stronger colour accent than the dark green tablecloth in the present painting. These monumental knee-length portraits from 1625 form a high point in Moreelse’s oeuvre; the meticulous representation of the costumes and the plasticity of the faces, devoid of the sfumato Moreelse employed before this period, are here at their strongest.

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. 219.