Object data
oil on canvas
support: height 169 cm × width 333.5 cm
outer size: depth 11 cm (support incl. frame)
Paulus Moreelse
1616
oil on canvas
support: height 169 cm × width 333.5 cm
outer size: depth 11 cm (support incl. frame)
The support is a single piece of fine, plainweave canvas that has been lined. Cusping is not visible. The single, brownish ground layer contains quartz and a brown earth pigment. Brushmarking in the paint layers is only visible in the sashes. The deep red sash worn by the ensign has a red lake layer over vermilion. The blue drapery on his shoulder is made up of indigo and lead white. Lead-tin yellow was used in the highlights on Captain Hoyngh’s red sash.
Poor. There are two repaired tears at bottom right. There are numerous small losses in both the ground and paint layers, and abraded passages throughout, as well as discoloured areas of retouching and overpaint. The varnish is extremely discoloured.
Commissioned by or for the sitters for the Kloveniersdoelen (headquarters of the arquebusiers’ civic guard); first mentioned in the Kloveniersdoelen, 1653 (‘Ibid. [op de grootte Heere-kamer, sijnde raecx aen de brugh, boven de deur] Jacob Gerritsz Hoing capn, Nanning Florisz Cloeck Lut, ao. 1616. geschildert.’);1 transferred to the Small Council of War Chamber in the town hall by 1758;2 on loan to the museum from the City of Amsterdam since 1899
Object number: SK-C-623
Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam
Copyright: Public domain
Paulus Moreelse (Utrecht c. 1571 - Utrecht 1638)
De Bie was the first author to give Moreelse’s year of birth; the artist’s baptismal record has not come down to us. His father, Jan Jansz Moreelse, was a cooper from Louvain. According to his 17th- and 18th-century biographers, Moreelse studied for two years with Michiel van Mierevelt, probably in Delft, and then spent a long period in Italy, where he received numerous portrait commissions in Rome. None of the paintings executed by Moreelse in Italy are known today. He returned to Utrecht by 1596, when he reportedly joined the saddlers’ guild, to which painters also belonged. In 1602 Moreelse married Antonia van Wintershoven. Because the ceremony took place in the town hall of Utrecht, Moreelse would not have been a member of the Reformed Church at this point. Later, however, he did join that congregation. His first dated painting, a Portrait of a Man is also from 1602.3 In the spring of 1611, Moreelse was elected dean of the saddlers’ guild and in September of the same year he became the first dean of the newly founded Guild of St Luke. He held this post again in 1612, 1615 and 1619. Twenty-eight pupils are recorded as having trained with Moreelse from 1611 on, more than with any other guild member. Together with Abraham Bloemaert, Moreelse was also one of the principal teachers at the drawing academy set up in Utrecht some time after the painters’ guild gained independence. Among Moreelse’s pupils were Dirck van Baburen (1594/95-1624), Pieter Portengen (c. 1612-43) and Jan ter Borch (?-1676). Two of his sons, Johan (after 1602-34) and Benjamin (before 1629-51), also became painters, and one of his daughters is reported to have assisted Moreelse with the execution of a portrait.
Moreelse was chiefly active as a portrait painter. In addition to his many portraits of Utrecht’s leading citizens, he received commissions from court circles, such as the 1621 Portrait of Sophia Hedwig, Countess of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, as Caritas, with her Children.4 Moreelse’s 1616 Officers and Other Civic Guardsmen of the IIIrd District of Amsterdam, under the Command of Captain Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh and Lieutenant Nanningh Florisz Cloeck (shown here) is the only civic guard piece by a Utrecht painter to have survived. Moreelse also painted histories and genre pieces, and is credited with introducing the single-figure shepherdess into Dutch painting. His activities as an architect include a plan for enlarging Utrecht (executed posthumously in 1663) and the design of the Catherijnepoort (1621-25; destroyed), one of the town gates. After having supported Prince Maurits’s dismissal of Utrecht’s town council in 1618, Moreelse was given a seat on the new town council, which he occupied until his death. He also served as churchwarden of the Buurkerk, headman of the civic guard, an alderman, and chief treasurer of Utrecht. Paulus Moreelse died on 6 March 1638 and was buried in the Buurkerk.
Jonathan Bikker, 2007
References
Van Mander 1604, fol. 280v; De Bie 1661, p. 131; Von Sandrart 1675 (1925), pp. 171, 178; Houbraken I, 1718, p. 49; Hoevenaar 1778, p. 9; Swillens 1926; De Jonge 1938, pp. 1-7, 139-53 (documents); Bok in Utrecht-Braunschweig 1986, pp. 322-25; Bok in Amsterdam 1993, pp. 311-12; Bok in San Francisco etc. 1997, p. 386; Domela Nieuwenhuis 2000; Domela Nieuwenhuis 2001, I, pp. 13-60, 203-50 (documents)
The present painting is the only civic guard piece by an Utrecht master to have survived, and Moreelse, together with Frans Hals, were the only artists not resident in Amsterdam to receive commissions from that city’s guard companies.5 Moreelse’s portrait shows 14 civic guardsmen from District III, which extended roughly from Damrak west to the Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal (Spuistraat), and was bounded by Kolksteeg on the north, and Dirk van Hasseltsteeg on the south. The names of the captain and lieutenant were recorded by Gerard Schaep in his 1653 list of portraits in the three civic guard headquarters in Amsterdam.6 The painting hung in the Kloveniersdoelen, the headquarters of the arquebusiers’ civic guard.
Standing to the left of the ensign is the captain, Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh (1555-1625), who is shown wearing an ornamental suit of armour and holding a short officer’s pike decorated with a large tassel in his right hand. Hoyngh also wears a chain with a portrait medallion of Prince Maurits.7 It is not known when or for what reason Hoyngh received this medallion, but perhaps it had something to do with Maurits’s visit to Amsterdam in 1613, on which occasion the city’s entire civic guard presented itself to the prince.8 Hoyngh, a Counter-Remonstrant, was a cloth merchant and dyer who lived in a house called ‘de Swarte Leeuw’ in Nieuwendijk (no. 156), a street in District III.9 In 1618 and 1620, he served as one of the city’s four burgomasters.
The lieutenant, Nanningh Florisz Cloeck (1567-1624), stands to the right of the ensign and holds a partisan. Cloeck was a Remonstrant, and a merchant and soap manufacturer by profession, and from 1607 to 1620 he was Commissioner of the Muster.10 He also lived in District III, in a house called ‘’t Wapen van Schagen’, the present-day Damrak no. 44. Unfortunately the identities of the ensign, who holds the red and white banner in the middle of the composition, and the other 11 civic guardsmen have not come down to us.
Tümpel suggested that it was the appointment of Hoyngh and Cloeck to captain and lieutenant in the third district that led to the commission of the present portrait.11 By 1616, however, Hoyngh had already been captain for at least 20 years, as he was portrayed as such in a 1596 civic guard piece by Pieter Isaacsz.12 The lieutenant in Pieter Isaacsz’s group portrait is Wijbrant Appelman, who died the year the painting was completed. Nanningh Florisz Cloeck may, therefore, have already taken over the position of lieutenant in District III in 1596.13 While it is not known when exactly he became lieutenant, in 1620 the pro-Remonstrant Cloeck was forced to resign his commission for making disapproving remarks about the Counter-Remonstrant burgomaster, Reijnier Pauw.14 It is interesting to note that one of the three burgomasters who called for this resignation was Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh.
The fact that Moreelse received this commission indicates that he already had a significant reputation outside Utrecht by 1616. The composition of his civic guard piece, however, is by no means innovative. The placement of the figures in two rows parallel to the picture plane, the figures in the second row shown higher behind a balustrade, is a compositional type that was popular in the 16th century and already employed in the earliest known independent civic guard piece in Amsterdam, from 1529.15 It is, perhaps, significant, that that painting hung in the arquebusiers’ headquarters, that is to say the same building where Moreelse’s portrait would be displayed. It cannot be claimed, however, that Moreelse was reviving an old compositional type, as Frans Badens had shown the civic guardsmen of District VII in the same manner around 1608.16 Compared to the 16th-century portraits for which this composition type was employed, and even Badens’s painting, Moreelse’s appears modern, as the figures are not pressed together and have a convincing voluminousness.17 Moreelse appears also to have followed Badens’s example in placing the two sergeants, identifiable by their halberds, at the extreme left and right in the bottom row. Like Badens’s painting as well, Moreelse’s includes an opening in the middle of the composition. In this case it provides a view into a series of interior spaces. The setting of the painting does not reflect the architecture of the arquebusiers’ headquarters, the tower ‘Swych Wtrecht’, but is fanciful.18 Apart from their obvious association with cannon balls, the two stone spheres on the balustrade also carried associations with the virtues of constancy and wisdom.19
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. 216.
Domela Nieuwenhuis 2001, I, p. 82-84, II, pp. 384-85, no. SAP32, with earlier literature
1903, p. 184, no. 1658; 1934, p. 198, no. 1658; 1976, p. 397, no. C 623; 2007, no. 216
J. Bikker, 2007, 'Paulus Moreelse, Officers and Other Civic Guardsmen of the IIIrd District of Amsterdam, under the Command of Captain Jacob Gerritsz Hoyngh and Lieutenant Nanningh Florisz Cloeck, 1616', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.10909
(accessed 14 November 2024 17:14:24).