Portrait of Pieter Boudaen Courten (1594-1668)

The support, an oak panel with a vertical grain, consists of three planks. It is bevelled on all sides, only slightly on the right. It has been primed with a thin off-white ground layer. The sitter’s face, collar and hands were prepared in a light grey dead colour. The paint was applied smoothly and opaquely, the only visible brushstrokes being in the sitter’s hair.

Fair. There is an old 14-cm crack at upper left. The background is overpainted. There is a great deal of craquelure in the overpaint. Several outlines and details in the sitter’s clothing have been reinforced, and there are discoloured retouchings throughout. The red lake pigment in the chair is discoloured and has become transparent. The varnish is also discoloured, crazed and matte at the retouchings.

Oak box frames, painted black with gilt sight edges and transitional sections

...; documented at Kasteel Popkensburg in an 18thcentury manuscript;¹¹RAU, PA 26, Des Tombe archive, inv. no. 18, ‘Genealogieën, genealogische en heraldische aantekeningen betreffende de familie van Citters en aanverwante families, (17e-19e eeuw): Boudaen (Courten), Walleran Sandra, Fourmenois, Buteux, Hoeufft’, no. 1: ‘hangende booven de spiegel met het waapen van hoefft. Pieter Boudaen Courten natus 1594 obijt 1668 AETATIS. SVAE 28. An.o 1619’; no. 2: ‘Catharina Fourmenois geb. tot Ceulen den 5 octob 1598. Overleeden den 21 Janu. 1665. 21. AETATIS.SVAE An.o 1619’. ? by descent through the families Boudaen Courten, Van Citters, Verheije van Citters, to Jonkheer Jacob de Witte van Citters (1817-76), The Hague; by whom bequeathed to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague, 1876, but given in usufruct to his sister Carolina Hester de Witte van Citters, The Hague (1820-1901);²²RAU, PA 26, Des Tombe archive, inv. no. 1038, ‘Testament van Jacob de Witte van Citters’, 16 June 1875. her husband Arnoldus Andries des Tombe (1818-1902), The Hague; transferred to the museum, as Salomon Mesdach, 1903

ObjectNumber: SK-A-2068

Credit line: Jonkheer J. de Witte van Citters Bequest, The Hague

Pieter Boudaen Courten (shown here) and Catharina Fourmenois (SK-A-2069) were married the year before these pendant portraits were executed. They are both shown three-quarter length, standing beside a chair. Great care has been taken over the depiction of the accessories and jewellery, lace collars and cuffs, and the materials of their extremely costly attire.⁵⁵See Gans 1961, pp. 108, 111, for Fourmenois’s stomacher and belt. The family coats of arms on the backs of both panels were probably added in the 18th century.⁶⁶Several of the coats of arms on paintings of members of this family are composites of the arms of more than one family. Those on the back of SK-A-2068 contain parts of the arms of two families: Boudaen (quarters 1 and 4) and Courten (quarters 2 and 3). This coat, and the arms of the Fourmenois family, are on the back of SK-A-2069. See CBG database.

Pieter Boudaen Courten, scion of a rich family of silk and linen merchants, was a director of the Middelburg chamber of the Dutch East India Company and a councillor of Middelburg. He was born in Rotterdam in 1594 as the son of Matthias Boudaen and Margarita Courten (SK-A-2073). His sister was Anna Boudaen Courten (SK-A-919). After his father’s death he lived for a while with his mother and stepfather in London before moving to Middelburg to help his uncle Pieter Courten (SK-A-2074) run the Zeeland branch of the family business. On 15 July 1618, in Middelburg, he married Catharina Fourmenois, his uncle’s stepdaughter. A lot is known about the personal life of Pieter Boudaen Courten and his family from the chronicle he kept.⁷⁷The full text is published in Wuestman 2005.

At the end of the 19th century, when these two pendants and the portrait of Margarita Courten were in the Des Tombe collection in The Hague,⁸⁸See the entry on SK-A-913. Bredius attributed them to the relatively unknown Middelburg painter Salomon Mesdach⁹⁹Lafenestre/Richtenberger 1898, p. 167. Bredius’s attribution was based on stylistic similarities to the portrait of Balthasar van Vlierden and his family, signed and dated 1612, which was also in a Hague collection at the time (fig. a). That coarsely painted, rather archaic piece, the only known work with Mesdach’s signature, may be one of his early works.

Bredius’s attribution is borne out by another, smaller group portrait, going by the patron’s annotation ‘By Mr. Salomon tot Middelburg’, which appears to have been painted after a lost original, probably by the same artist. That portrait, showing Dr Pieter Gerritsz Schaep and Margriete Pauli Halling with their son, can be dated in or after 1624 (fig. b).¹⁰¹⁰Coll. cat. Amsterdam 1975/79, p. 414, no. 610, 4 and 5. One characteristic of that small group portrait and the works described here is the detailed rendering of the clothing, which in the cases of Margriete Pauli Halling and Catharina Fourmenois even extended to the lacing of their decorated stomachers.

In the past century, more and more portraits of members of the Courten family have been attributed to Mesdach. The ones most closely related to these two companion pieces are the portraits of Jacob Pergens, Anna Boudaen Courten and Margarita Courten, but that of Peter Courten (SK-A-913), and those of a man, probably Walterus Fourmenois, and of Hortensia del Prado also display similarities in style and the structure of the paint layers. However risky it may be to ascribe paintings to an artist whose oeuvre consists almost entirely of attributions, there is every reason to believe that all these portraits were painted by Mesdach. Just as members of families related to him by marriage commissioned portraits from Gortzius Geldorp for decades, it seems that Pieter Boudaen Courten and his family always turned to the same artist.

Copies of the present pendants, in which the sitters are reduced to half-lengths, are still in the family.¹¹¹¹Photo IB. The Rijksmuseum also has a portrait of Catharina Fourmenois at the age of six by Gortzius Geldorp (SK-A-2070), and a copper shield of 1623 with the coats of arms of the Boudaen and Fourmenois families.¹²¹²SK-A-929; with the Fourmenois arms reversed left for right.

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. 174.

Wuestman 2005, p. 43

1903, p. 171, nos. 1545, 1546 (as Mesdach); 1934, p. 183, nos. 1545, 1546 (as Mesdach); 1960, pp. 201-02, nos. 1545, 1546 (as Mesdach); 1976, p. 376, nos. A 2068, A 2069 (as Mesdach); 2007, no. 174

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'attributed to Salomon Mesdach, Portrait of Pieter Boudaen Courten (1594-1668), 1619', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.9071