Pregled posta

Marketing

415 x 295 mm
oil on canvas on panel

Inscription in Latin: "AETAT: SUA 32" "ANo 1652"
"N" [na? Dutch for "after"]
".DC."

On back, on torn paper:
"F[or J] Ri.....k
[illegible]"

Untitled painting by an anonymous artist, apparently of Jan van Riebeeck, founder of the Cape Colony of South Africa in 1652, as he might have looked like that year. The Latin inscription and the background of ships sailing towards what looks like Table Mountain, the natural feature behind Cape Town, round out the picture. Except that it isn't Jan van Riebeeck.

I bought the painting from an antique shop this week. The owner had gotten it at an auction in March 2003, as "17th/18th century painting."

[UPDATE]
A friend who is a professional art restorer says the figure and background use two different techniques. The background appears to be a normal oil painting, but the figure of van Riebeeck appears to also have an extra layer, of paper, underneath. According to my firend, a common technique in the 1920s in Belgium and France was to lay a photograph down on a canvas or board and then paint over it. If that's the case for the portrait, then it would explain the vagueness relative to the original, the propagation of an erroneous likeness not available to the public before 1884 *and* the figure being flipped horizontally from the original. Details and story below.
[/UPDATE]

The painting shows a half-length figure of a 17th-century Dutch man as he looked in 1652 at the age of 32, according to the Latin legend at the top. Upper left is the legend "AETAT: SUA 32," meaning "the 32nd year of his life." Upper right is "AN[o] 1652" (year 1652). Below the date is a small capital "N" and the initials ".DC." A torn fragment of paper glued to the back says "R....k." The man is wearing dark clothes with a fancy lace collar, in the style of the time, and has his right hand over his breast. In the background are ships sailing away from the viewer toward what looks like a mountain. All of this suggests this is a portrait of Jan van Riebeeck as he might have looked in 1652, the year he founded the Dutch Cape Colony (now Cape Town) and was its first administrator. The mountain in the background then is Table Mountain on the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa. There's a layer underneath of brick-red primer, showing through mostly on the hand.

Jan (or Johan) van Riebeeck (1618-77) was a ship's surgeon for the VOC (Dutch East India Company). In December 1651, he and his wife sailed to South Africa's Cape of Good Hope, raching it in April 1652 and founded the Cape Colony (now Cape Town) as a defensible reprovisioning station for VOC ships headed east. Two years later they moved on to Batavia (now Jakarta) and then Malacca, where he died.

The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam has a similar portrait, painted in 1650 by Dirck Craey (d. 1664 or 1668). Craey kept the House of Orange's art collection in the Hague, and left behind very few of his own works. Until 1976, the Rijksmuseum's portrait was thought to be of van Riebeeck, and an accompanying portrait, that of his wife Maria (nee Quevellerius). In 1884, a descendant of van Riebeeck, Jonkheer (Lord, sort of) J.H.F.K. van Swinderen, donated the two portraits as those of the van Riebeecks and the museum took it as read. But in 1976, the Rijksmuseum did a thorough review of their inventory, and many of the works donated by Jhr. van Swinderen were reclassified. The Rijksmuseum now lists the two Craey portraits as those of Bartholomeus Vermuyden (1616-1650) and his wife.

According to the 34th Museum Bulletin, 1988 supplement to the 1976 Rijksmuseum catalog, the designation changed as a result of genealogical research by the Trippenhuis museum. The house is a legacy of the Trip family. In the course of researching the family tree, the genealogists discovered that the famous likeness is actually that of Vermuyden.

The figure in my portrait is obviously copied from the one in the Rijksmuseum, down to almost every detail, but not as well executed as the orginal. It's also reversed (oddly, the original was left-handed). The initials "DC" could refer to Dirck Craey, but Carey signed his portraits "D. Craey." If the small "N" in my painting means "after" (Dutch "na" or "naar"), then it would mean this was a painting after Craey's portrait.

So the question is when and by whom? There's lovely craquelure of the oil paint and primer, and the wood looks pretty old (i.e., not plywood). But that's not my specialty; a friend is looking into that. The Latin inscription was common through the 18th century. It's unlikely to really be from 1652, since van Riebeeck would have been too busy then setting up the colony to sit for a portrait. There is a later portrait, though, possibly made in the 1660s, and he looks older and more statesmanlike. An

"Aldine Readers Primer," revised edition, 1916. Illustrated by Margaret Ely Webb. Authors Catherine Bryce and Frank Spaulding. Newson and Co., 1907, 1915, 1916.