Object data
oil on panel
support: height 75.5 cm × width 106.5 cm × thickness 0.6 cm
outer size: depth 5.0 cm (support incl. frame)
Willem Cornelisz Duyster
c. 1625
oil on panel
support: height 75.5 cm × width 106.5 cm × thickness 0.6 cm
outer size: depth 5.0 cm (support incl. frame)
The support is an oak panel with a horizontal grain consisting of three planks and is bevelled on all sides. The top plank is thicker than the other two. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1603. The panel could have been ready for use by 1614, but a date in or after 1620 is more likely. The panel had already been used for a painting with an upright format. X-rays revealed two large female half-lengths below the painted surface. The paint was applied very smoothly and opaquely. The faces and the colourful fabrics of the clothes of the foreground figures were rendered with great care. There are several pentimenti, for instance in the leg of the seated man on the right and in the ruff of the woman next to him. The boy on the right was painted on top of the woman’s sleeve, which might indicate that he is a later addition.
Van Thiel 1977
Fair. The background is abraded. There are noticeable fillings along the upper panel join, and many matte retouchings.
...; estate inventory Cornelis Ploos van Amstel (1726-98), 19 March 1799 (‘Een dito [Schildery] in dito [oly verff ] door Duyster verbeeldende de Trouw van Adriaan Ploos van Amstelen vrouwe Agnes van Byler’);1 his wife, Margaretha Sonmans (? -1822), Moordrecht;2 ? her niece Meinouda Engelberts or Meinouda Engelberts’s daughter, Sara Jacoba Simons;3...; Jonkheer Johannes Ploos van Amstel (1804-83), The Hague; donated to the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap by Jonkheer Johannes Ploos van Amstel and his son Jan Adriaan Gijsbert Ploos van Amstel (1843-94), Wanneperveen, 1878; on loan to the museum since c. 1886
Object number: SK-C-514
Credit line: On loan from the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap
Copyright: Public domain
Willem Cornelisz Duyster (Amsterdam 1599 - Amsterdam 1635)
Willem Cornelis Duyster, the son of a carpenter, was baptized in the Oude Kerk in Amsterdam on 30 August 1599. His surname is derived from the house ‘De Duystere Werelt’ (The dark world), in which he and his family lived from 1620 onwards. His teacher is unknown. It has been speculated that he studied with the portrait painter Cornelis van der Voort or with Barend van Someren. The suggestion that Pieter Codde was his teacher was based on the misinterpretation of a document from 1625 that reveals that Duyster and Codde had a quarrel at Meerhuysen, a country house rented by Van Someren. Duyster was also well-acquainted with the guardroom painter Simon Kick. Duyster and Kick married each other’s sisters in a double wedding on 5 September 1631, and both couples lived in ‘De Duystere Werelt’. Duyster died of the plague at the age of 35. He was buried in the Zuiderkerk on 31 January 1635.
His oeuvre consists of merry companies, guardroom scenes and portraits, close in style to those by Pieter Codde. Few of Duyster’s paintings are dated. Philips Angel praised his skill at painting fabrics in 1642.
Gerdien Wuestman, 2007
References
Angel 1642, p. 55; Houbraken II, 1719, p. 145; Bredius 1888a; Playter 1972, I, pp. 1-14, 23-35; Beaujean in Saur XXXI, 2002, pp. 343-44
When this painting was donated to the Koninklijk Oudheidkundig Genootschap in 1878, much of the paint surface, including the signature, was obscured by overpainting. It has been attributed to various artists, including Herman Berntsz van Byler,4 Johann Liss,5 Pieter Codde and Jan Miense Molenaer,6 until Bredius attributed it to Willem Cornelisz Duyster on the basis of stylistic similarities to The Tric-trac Players (SK-A-1427) in the Rijksmuseum.7 Bredius’s attribution was not confirmed until 1972, almost a century later, when the overpainting was removed during restoration, revealing the original background and the tiled floor with Duyster’s signature.8
Datings of the painting range from shortly after 16209 to c. 1630.10 Playter gives both 1623 and 1625,11 while Van Thiel placed it c. 1625-28 on the evidence of the style and the costumes.12 The lack of dated works in Duyster’s oeuvre makes it difficult to arrive at a precise date, but in view of the clothing one around the middle of the 1620s is plausible.
The subject is a problem that is still unresolved. Seated on the right are a man and woman with their hands entwined, while on the left musicians are accompanying a round dance. There are several portraits in the group on the right and among the dancers. One particularly striking figure is the man in the left foreground, who is wearing a gold medal of honour on a two-stranded gold chain. The musicians and the couple kissing in the background are bit players.13
When the painting was in the collection of Cornelis Ploos van Amstel at the end of the 18th century the subject was already being identified as the wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler. Adriaen Ploos (1585-1639), who had the word Amstel added to his surname in 1636, held a number of important political offices, including delegate from Utrecht at the States-General. On 29 July 1637 he was one of the signatories to the official ‘States Translation’ of the Bible.14 However, the marriage of Adriaen Ploos and Agnes van Bijler (d. 1661) took place on 6 August 1616, some ten years before the painting could have been made. It is also unlikely that Duyster was commemorating the couple’s tin wedding, since only one child is shown, and they had several. The suggestion by a descendant that this may be a record of another family wedding is speculative.15
The question is whether the subject of this painting by Duyster, who lived in Amsterdam, should even be sought in the history of the Ploos family of Utrecht. Cornelis Ploos van Amstel, the former owner of the group portrait, passed himself off as a descendant of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel, but he was not a direct descendant, and it is also far from certain that the painting was passed down through the family.16 It would not be the first time that Ploos van Amstel sowed confusion by over-eagerly identifying portrait sitters.17
According to Playter, the man standing behind the seated couple appears in other works by Duyster, and may be a self-portrait.18 Van Thiel, who came to the same conclusion on the evidence of the man’s pose and the direction of his gaze, suspects that the now indistinct scene of a helmeted horseman and three other figures on the tapestry in the right background might explain the reason for the celebrations.19 That hypothesis, though, is untenable, since examination of the paint layer during restoration in the early 1970s showed that the dark layer applied on top of the tapestry was painted by the artist himself.
Gerdien Wuestman, 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. 63.
Havard 1873, p. 68 (as Herman Berntsz van Byler); Bredius 1888a, p. 194 (as The Wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler); Playter 1972, I, pp. 56-57, 59-60, II, p. I; Van Thiel 1977; Van Thiel 1995, pp. 45, 53, with earlier literature
1886, p. 16, no. 59d (as Pieter Codde or Jan Miense Molenaer, The Wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler); 1887, p. 105, no. 879a (as attributed to Johann Liss, The Wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler); 1888, p. 105, no. 880 (as The Wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler,1616); 1903, p. 91, no. 851 (as The Wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler, 1616); 1934, p. 90, no. 851; 1960, p. 90, no. 851; 1976, p. 207, no. C 514; 2007, no. 63
G. Wuestman, 2007, 'Willem Cornelisz. Duyster, A Wedding Feast, traditionally called ‘The Wedding of Adriaen Ploos van Amstel and Agnes van Bijler’, 1616, c. 1625', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8367
(accessed 5 October 2024 14:21:40).