Support The copper plate, approx. 0.2 cm thick, has evident hammer marks on the reverse.
Preparatory layers The single, light cream-coloured ground extends up to the edges of the support. It contains what appears to be lead white and orange-coloured earth pigments.
Underdrawing Cursory, thick, fluid, dark lines indicate the placement of the heads with partial contour lines.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front and from dark to light, with reserves for the heads, visible at the contours of the figures in the middle of the back row. The faces have a dark base colour for the shaded areas and were efficiently executed with lighter paints for the flesh tones and impasted highlights. The base colour was largely left exposed in the faces of the men at the back, whereas the faces of the foreground figures were more elaborately worked up and show more details.
Gwen Tauber [publication date 2026]

Fair. The reverse has some green copper corrosion along the top and bottom edges. A history of flaking paint is evident in old paint losses and numerous darkened pinpoint retouchings. Blistering, in the tablecloth for instance, may indicate spots of corrosion. The varnish is strongly discoloured and highly oxidized.

…; ? probate inventory, Diederick Sticke, Deventer, January/February 1689 (‘In de beste camer: De vredehandelinge van Münster’);¹¹S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, II, The Hague 1960, p. 84.…; sale, Anna Catharina Putman (†, Deventer), Amsterdam (P. Schley), 17 August 1803, no. 80, as ‘Terburg. (G.)’ (‘Deeze ryke Ordonnantie van meer dan zeventig Beelden, steld voor de Vredehandeling te Münster, dit stuk is van een alleruitvoerigste behandeling, en bekend, door de Prent van J. Suyderhoef, welke naar dit Schildery gegraveerd is. […] op koper, hoog 18, breed 23 1/2 duim [46.3 x 60.4 cm]’), fl. 340, to C.P. Roos;²²Copy RKD.…; purchased by the museum, 1803;³³E.W. Moes and E. van Biema, De Nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum, Amsterdam 1909, pp. 64, 66, 196, 217. first recorded in the museum, 22 December 1808⁴⁴E.W. Moes and E. van Biema, De Nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum, Amsterdam 1909, p. 217.

Object number: SK-A-405

The original of the group portrait with the ratification of the Treaty of Münster is one of Gerard ter Borch’s best-known works.¹²¹²London, The National Gallery. See N. MacLaren, The Dutch School: 1600-1900, coll. cat. London (The National Gallery) 1991, I, pp. 35-36; A. McNeil Kettering, Gerard ter Borch en de Vrede van Munster, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) 1998, p. 8. It was executed in Münster, where the artist attended the peace negotiations in 1646-48, and shows the ceremony held in the Council Chamber of the city’s town hall on 15 May of the latter year to seal the end of the Eighty Years’ War between the Dutch and the Spanish. The papal emissary Fabio Chigi wrote on 9 July 1648 that he had already seen the painting, which means that Ter Borch had finished it in only a few weeks.¹³¹³See C.J.A. Genders, ‘De bevestiging van de Vrede van Munster – 1648 – door Gerard Ter Borch’, Spiegel Historiael 8 (1973), pp. 642-50, esp. p. 649. Not long afterwards he ordered a full-size reproduction from the Haarlem engraver Jonas Suyderhoef. That print was completed by 1650 at the latest, for in that year Ter Borch offered 23 impressions of it to the town of Kampen.¹⁴¹⁴A. McNeil Kettering, Gerard ter Borch en de Vrede van Munster, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) 1998, pp. 39-40.

The Rijksmuseum’s version is, like the prototype, on copper and is the same size.¹⁵¹⁵See S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, II, The Hague 1960, p. 84, no. 57b, for a second copy in Stadtmuseum Münster. It was still being touted as the original at an auction in 1803, but a year after it had been bought by the museum its first curator, Jan Gerard Waldorp, realized that it was a replica, and in 1843 it was downgraded to a ‘poor copy’ after Ter Borch.¹⁶¹⁶E.W. Moes and E. van Biema, De Nationale Konst-Gallery en het Koninklijk Museum, Amsterdam 1909, p. 196; C. Apostool, Aanwijzing der schilderijen, berustende op ’s Rijks Museum te Amsterdam, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1843, p. 60, no. 313. That qualification is correct, as can be seen, among other things, from the solid, completely closed paint surface, the shapeless hands and the harsh chiaroscuro contrasts in the uniformly rendered faces. Other differences from the prototype that also underline its inferior quality are the less foreshortened top of the table with the documents and dispatch boxes of the Spanish (on the right) and Dutch (on the left).

Although the original probably remained in Ter Borch’s possession until the early 1670s, being in the house of a distant cousin, the Deventer burgomaster Hendrik ter Borch, in 1674,¹⁷¹⁷M.E. Houck, Mededeelingen betreffende Gerhard ter Borch, Robert van Voerst, Pieter van Anraedt, Aleijda Wolfsen, Derck Hardensteijn en Henrick ter Bruggen, benevens aanteekeningen omtrent hunne familieleden, Zwolle 1899, p. 77; N. MacLaren, The Dutch School: 1600-1900, coll. cat. London (The National Gallery) 1991, I, p. 37, esp. note 28. the present copy was not made after it but after Suyderhoef’s print.¹⁸¹⁸C.J.A. Genders, ‘De bevestiging van de Vrede van Munster – 1648 – door Gerard Ter Borch’, Spiegel Historiael 8 (1973), pp. 642-50, esp. pp. 649-50, states that for a long time it was regarded as a preliminary study for the original in the National Gallery in London. The bottom edge of the tablecloth is draped in exactly the same way as in the engraving, and differs from that in the original painting. Ter Borch’s signature on the tablet on the wall on the left has also disappeared.

One striking difference from both the print and the original painting is in the artist’s own likeness in the man on the far left in the second row. He has a double chin and longer hair (or a wig). He does not look so youthful anymore, and resembles his later self-portraits of around 1668 and 1675.¹⁹¹⁹The Hague, Mauritshuis, and Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Gemäldegalerie; illustrated in S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, I, The Hague 1959, pp. 363, 391. His collar has also been replaced by a tie or cravat which cannot be dated before the last quarter of the seventeenth century.²⁰²⁰J.H. der Kinderen-Besier, Spelevaart der mode: De kledij onzer voorouders in de zeventiende eeuw, Amsterdam 1950, pp. 214-15. It is not known why the copy was made with these modifications.²¹²¹There are also alterations to Ter Borch’s face in another copy in Stadtmuseum Münster. See A. McNeil Kettering, Gerard ter Borch en de Vrede van Munster, exh. cat. The Hague (Mauritshuis) 1998, p. 48, note 6. The changes to the self-portrait suggest that it was painted by someone in Ter Borch’s circle, possibly in the 1670s, after the original had left the artist’s possession, with only the print remaining as a model. It is possible that the Rijksmuseum picture was commissioned by the Deventer burgomaster Diederick Sticke, who may have been the owner in January/February 1689.²²²²See Provenance.

Gerbrand Korevaar [publication date 2026]

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

S.J. Gudlaugsson, Geraert Ter Borch, II, The Hague 1960, p. 84, no. 57a; C.J.A. Genders, ‘De bevestiging van de Vrede van Munster – 1648 – door Gerard Ter Borch’, Spiegel Historiael 8 (1973), pp. 642-50, esp. pp. 649-50

1809, p. 71, no. 305 (as Gerard Terburg); 1843, p. 60, no. 313 (‘poor copy’); 1853, p. 27, no. 278 (fl. 2,000); 1858, pp. 140-41, no. 309; 1880, pp. 303-04, no. 355; 1887, p. 166, no. 1414; 1903, p. 58, no. 576; 1934, p. 56, no. 576; 1960, p. 49, no. 576; 1976, p. 132, no. A 405

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2026, 'copy after Gerard ter (II) Borch, Ratification of the Treaty of Münster, 15 May 1648, c. 1675 - c. 1700', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20026697