Portrait of Maria van Oosterwijck (1630-1693)

Support The plain-weave canvas has been wax-resin lined. All tacking edges have been removed. Cusping is present on all sides, but only very faintly visible at the bottom.
Preparatory layers The single, greyish-brown ground extends up to the current edges of the canvas. It contains white, black and earth pigments.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the current edges of the canvas. The composition was built up from the back to the front, without the use of reserves, and from dark to light. Whereas the face and hands were delicately rendered, the dress was brushed in freely, in part with very bold, even crude touches and contours. The paint was predominantly applied in opaque colours, wet in wet, except for the red and blue glazes over the chair and the ribbons of the dress. Under the ribbons fluid dark lines, possibly part of an initial sketch in paint, and red underpaint are visible. The paint layer is quite smooth, with textured brushstrokes only in the flesh colours and dress, adding to the modelling. A few accents, details and dark contours were placed lastly. X-radiography revealed that the sitter was first depicted in a painting pose, with her right arm stretched out towards an easel and her hand, holding a brush, tried in two different positions. In its final, lowered, version, some further adjustments were made, which have become visible to the naked eye. The arm was broader at first and the position of the fingers was slightly altered. The palette was initially smaller, as can also be seen. In the niche in the left background a red form is present under the paint surface, very faintly noticeable, which is probably the underpainting for a flower that was never executed.
Willem de Ridder, 2024

Fair. There are several losses and some abrasion throughout. The blue glazes of the ribbons have faded. The varnish is discoloured.

…; collection Pieter verLoren van Themaat (1830-1885), Utrecht;¹¹NHA, ARS, Kop., inv. 289, p. 76, no. 171 (2 January 1886). his sale, Amsterdam (F. Muller et al.), 30 October 1885, no. 98, fl. 569.25, to De Vries, for the museum²²NHA, ARS, IS, inv. 165, no. 465 (13 November 1885); NHA, ARS, Kop., inv. 289, p. 76, no. 171 (2 January 1886).

ObjectNumber: SK-A-1292

Maria van Oosterwijck is one of the best-known seventeenth-century female painters, and one of the very few who could live from their art. She specialized in flower still lifes, of which some 30 survive. Her first dated work is from as late as 1667, when she was 37, but by then she had already made an international name for herself. On 2 December of that year Cosimo III de’ Medici said that her still lifes were at least as good as Willem van Aelst’s.⁷⁷G.J. Hoogewerf, De twee reizen van Cosimo de’ Medici, prins van Toscane, door de Nederlanden (1667-1669): Journalen en documenten, Amsterdam 1919, p. 65. Around 1668 Emperor Leopold I bought her Religious Still Life,⁸⁸Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; illustrated in A. Chong and W.T. Kloek (eds.), Still-Life Paintings from the Netherlands 1550-1720, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum)/Cleveland (The Cleveland Museum of Art) 1999-2000, p. 254. and in 1669 Cosimo III de’ Medici purchased two of her paintings on his second visit to the Netherlands.⁹⁹For a biography see Berardi in D. Gaze (ed.), Dictionary of Women Artists, II, London 1997, pp. 1042-45. Wallerant Vaillant’s 1671 portrait of her is confirmation of her professional position as well as being one of the finest works he ever produced.¹⁰¹⁰Hofstede de Groot notes, RKD, doubted that the Rijksmuseum painting was of Van Oosterwijck, but a double portrait of her and Dirk Schelte (present whereabouts unknown) confirms the identification; for that portrait see B.J.A. Renckens, ‘Een portret van de schilderes Maria van Oosterwijck en de dichter Dirk Schelte’, Oud Holland 74 (1959), pp. 236-39, esp. p. 238, and A. Roy, Gérard de Lairesse (1640-1711), Paris 1992, pp. 275-76.

Here Vaillant employed a direct manner of execution, with painterly decisions often being taken while he was working.¹¹¹¹See Technical notes. The present canvas is related to several elegant three-quarter-length portraits of women made after Vaillant’s return from Germany and France to Amsterdam around 1666-67. One feature they have in common is the delicately brushed arms and heads, while the handling in the light-coloured clothing is much looser.¹²¹²Portrait of Catharina Hunthum, 1667, canvas, 106 x 86 cm, Amsterdam, Museum van Loon; illustrated in N. Rogeaux, Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677), graveur à la manière noire, dessinateur à la pierre noire et peintre de portraits, diss., Université Paris IV-Sorbonne 1999, no. P23, and photo RKD. Portrait of a Young Woman, 1671, canvas, 77 x 61 cm, private collection; illustrated in ibid., no. P39, and photo RKD. Portrait of a Woman, Angerlo, Familie van Weede Stichting; photo RMA. Vaillant’s likeness of Van Oosterwijck is his only known painting of a woman in which the model is seated. It shares elements with his mezzotint after a self-portrait by Caspar Netscher,¹³¹³Illustrated in F.W.H. Hollstein et al., Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts ca. 1450-1700, XXXI, Amsterdam 1987, p. 181, no. 189. For Netscher’s painted self-portrait in the Rijksmuseum, see SK-A-2666. such as the figure’s position within the picture, the three-quarter-length format, the clear allusion to the sitter’s profession in the shape of the palette and brushes, and the curtain in the background.

In contrast to a work such as the portrait of a female painter of around 1675-85 attributed to Michiel van Musscher, in which both the artist and art are praised by personifications and allegorical accessories,¹⁴¹⁴Raleigh, North Carolina Museum of Art; illustrated in R.M. Nagy and J. Spence (eds.), North Carolina Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections, coll. cat. Raleigh 1998, p. 112. Van Oosterwijck’s is restrained and has only a few references to her profession. It is possible that Vaillant originally planned to place a bloom in the indistinct niche in the left background, because there are traces in this area of a tulip-shaped red underpainting. Although that motif may have been intended as an allusion to Van Oosterwijck’s specialization, flowers are not uncommon in Vaillant’s portraits of women. The unidentified book on her lap has been interpreted as an edition of Karel van Mander’s 1604 Schilder-boeck,¹⁵¹⁵R. Priem, Dutch Masters from the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, exh. cat. Melbourne (National Gallery of Victoria) 2005, p. 7. but it is more likely to be a Bible, stressing her virtuous and pious nature.¹⁶¹⁶On which see Korevaar in C. Vogelaar and G. Korevaar (eds.), Rembrandts moeder: Mythe en werkelijkheid, exh. cat. Leiden (Stedelijk Museum De Lakenhal) 2005-06, pp. 129, 132. Van Oosterwijck, who never married, came from a family of theologians. Her father, Jacobus van Oosterwijck, was a minister, and in 1658 her brother Lambertus went to study theology in Leiden, where she lived with him for several years. Her reputation for piety followed her into the early eighteenth century, when Houbraken described her as ‘chaste and extremely devout’.¹⁷¹⁷A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, II, Amsterdam 1719, p. 216: ‘zedig en buitengewoon godsdienstig’. Her still lifes, in which she incorporated many religious symbols, also show that faith as well as art played an important part in her life.

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

A. Czobor, ‘Ein Bildnis André Vaillants von Wallerant Vaillant’, Oud Holland 73 (1958), pp. 242-46, esp. p. 244; N. Rogeaux, Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677), graveur à la manière noire, dessinateur à la pierre noire et peintre de portraits, diss., Université Paris IV-Sorbonne 1999, pp. 54, 221, 222, 464-65, no. P26, with earlier literature; N. Rogeaux, ‘Wallerant Vaillant (1623-1677), portraitiste hollandais’, Revue du Nord 84 (2002), pp. 25-49, esp. pp. 41, 43

1887, p. 171, no. 1458; 1903, p. 264, no. 2341; 1976, p. 552, no. A 1292

Gerbrand Korevaar, 2024, 'Wallerant Vaillant, Portrait of Maria van Oosterwijck (1630-1693), 1671', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5622