Sculpted in the round.

The surface is seriously weathered and flaking off. Restored cracks at the hands, large muscles of the lower part of the left arm have been touched up, left upper arm has been filled in, the head of the Hydra has been reattached. Hercules’ hands holding a club broke off in 1972; they have been fixed back on without the club and filled in at the wrists. The club is not authentic and is kept separately in storage.

? acquired from the artist by Jacob Alewyn Ghyzen (d. 1760), c. 1722-28; his garden, country house Bos en Hoven, Heemstede, first recorded around 1732;¹¹Het Zegepralent Kennemerlant, c. 1732, vol. 2, no. 98. Written communication by the late Pieter Fischer, 1 May 1991. …; from the dealer Raoul Heilbronner, Geneva, on loan to the museum, 1924; by whom donated to the museum, 1925

Object number: BK-NM-13215-B

Credit line: Gift of R. Heilbronner, Geneva

Jan Pieter van Baurscheit I (1669-1728) came from Wormersdorf near Bonn, Germany. He was part of the retinue of Maximilian II Emanuel of Bavaria, the new governor of the Spanish Netherlands, coming to the Southern Netherlands in 1692. Baurscheit settled in Antwerp to train as a sculptor in the workshop of Pieter Scheemaekers I (1640-1714).²²For father and son Baurscheit, see A. Jansen and C. Van Herck, ‘J.P. Van Baurscheit I en J.P. Van Baurscheit II: Antwerpsche beeldhouwers uit de 18e eeuw’, XVIIIe Jaarboek van den Koninklijken Oudheidkundigen Kring van Antwerpen, 1942, pp. 1-74; A. Staring, ‘Aanteekeningen op de Hollandse beeldhouwwerken van J.P. van Baurscheit, vader en zoon’, Oudheidkundig Jaarboek 13 (1946), pp. 40-49; F. Baudouin, ‘Enkele beeldhouwwerken van Jan Pieter van Baurscheit, vader en zoon’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 21 (1970), pp. 187-98. In 1695 he registered as an independent master in the local guild of St Luke and set up a workshop there which was soon one of the foremost sculpture suppliers in the Netherlands. Baurscheit’s work included funerary monuments, architectural art and sculptural decorations for church interiors. Garden statues and vases (cf. BK-NM-8832), mainly in sandstone, also featured significantly in his production.³³Cf. A. Staring, ‘Een portretbuste van J.P. van Baurscheit den Vader’, Bulletin Koninklijke Nederlandse Oudheidkundige Bond 5 (1952), pp. 41-44.

Baurscheit’s private clientele included not only local patrons, but also distinguished gentlemen from the Northern Netherlands, especially from the provinces of Zeeland and Holland. He corresponded with the well-known Rotterdam painter Adriaen van der Werff (1659-1722), who placed an order for four busts and two herms for his own garden with the sculptor and mediated in a number of commissions for various other Dutch patrons.⁴⁴F. Lammertse, ‘Four Letters from Adriaen van der Werff to the Antwerp Sculptor Jan Peter van Baurscheit’, Simiolus 34 (2009-10), pp. 119-41.

Baurscheit’s son, with the same name, Jan Pieter van Baurscheit II (1699-1768), worked closely with his father from round 1720. After his father’s death he carried on the sculpture workshop, though he primarily made a name for himself as an architect. Father and son used a similar monogram, IPVB or PVB (ligatured). Generally speaking,⁵⁵There are a few known cases in which the son used the same monogram as his father. Cf. a group with a putto and a satyr dated ‘1730’ and a figure of Diana dated ‘1731’, see advertisement art dealer Bonhams in Weltkunst 47 (1977), p. 2022 (ill.) and I.M. Breedveldt Boer, Tekenen en Vasseren: Het bedrijf van Jan Peter van Baurscheit (1699-1768) en de architectuur in het tweede kwart van de achttiende eeuw, 2003 (diss., Universiteit Utrecht), p. 50 (ill.), respectively. the monogram with the loop of the ‘P’ attached to the first stroke of the ‘V’ would have belonged to the son, and the monogram with the loop attached to the second stroke (as with the garden statue in question) would be the father’s. A Hercules and Antaeus group in the garden of Huis ten Donck (Slikkerveer) dated 1710 is very akin stylistically to the Hercules sculpture discussed here and bears the same monogram.⁶⁶Cf. Scholten in M. Beerman, F. van Burkom and F. Grijzenhout (eds.), Beeldengids Nederland, Rotterdam 1994, no. H15. In view of the early date, it is bound to be the elder Baurscheit. The statues have the same heavy build, into which a baroque litheness is introduced by depicting Hercules’ muscular torso with the legs in contrapposto. Their protoptype can be dated to c. 1700-10. On the other hand, the statue of Androclus and the Lion (BK-NM-13215-D), has a rather static pose and has more in common with the statue (likewise signed by the father) depicting Pan in the garden of country house De Wildenborch in Vorden.⁷⁷Photo in Object File RMA. Their designs will have been produced at a later date in Baurscheit’s career, in the course of the 1720s, when he was leaning more towards a classicist style.

Baurscheit normally produced such large garden statues to order, although he probably also had some existing models or even finished sculptures available for customers to choose from. That would seem to have been the case with the ensemble to which the present sculpture belongs, which consists of four statues: Hercules and the Hydra (shown here), Hercules with the Broken Column (BK-NM-13215-A), Hercules and Cacus (BK-NM-13215-C) and Androclus and the Lion (BK-NM-13215-D). These came from the garden of country house Bos en Hoven (near Heemstede) which was pulled down in 1925. A print from around 1732 (fig. a) shows how the four sculptures were arranged there along the Heerenweg.⁸⁸Written communication Pieter Fischer, 1 May 1991. At that stage – from 1722 onwards – the house was owned by the Amsterdam merchant Jacob Alewyn Ghyzen (d. 1760). The illogical combination of the present Androclus statue and the series of three Hercules’ groups suggests that the artist had not conceived the works as an ensemble. It is highly likely that the client had made the seemingly random selection, based on what was available in the workshop.⁹⁹E. de Jong and C. Schellekens, Het beeld buiten: Vier eeuwen tuinsculptuur in Nederland, exh. cat. Heino/Wijhe (Kasteel ’t Nijenhuis) 1994, p. 79. The fact that Baurscheit used some of his models more than once, is apparent from the existence of a second statue of Androclus which is identical to the one from this ensemble. It stands in the garden of Singraven House in Denekamp (fig. b).

It is possible that a pre-existing model was also used for the Hercules and Cacus group (BK-NM-13215-C). It is known from letters that Baurscheit made a terracotta model of a Hercules group in 1707 for the Rotterdam collector Adriaen Paets. The description corresponds precisely with the piece discussed here.¹⁰¹⁰F. Lammertse, ‘Four Letters from Adriaen van der Werff to the Antwerp Sculptor Jan Peter van Baurscheit’, Simiolus 34 (2009-10), pp. 119-41, esp. pp. 140-41 (letters 3 and 4). It involves a proposal for a terracotta design for a 5.5 Rijnland-foot (1.73 metre) tall garden statue that Paets had ordered from Baurscheit. Evidently the choice of subject had not yet been determined, since the sculptor had also sent a model of a ‘graceful little woman’. The painter Van der Werff, who mediated in the assignment, made extensive comments on the two models in a letter to the sculptor which he sent with the two models on 17 January 1708. He suggested several alterations in the pose of ‘the Hercules’ and proposed that the lower figure (Cacus?) be brought forward a little.¹¹¹¹F. Lammertse, ‘Four Letters from Adriaen van der Werff to the Antwerp Sculptor Jan Peter van Baurscheit’, Simiolus 34 (2009-10), pp. 119-41, esp. p. 141 (letter 4). It is not known if this design was the one that Paets had made in stone. Be it as it may, Baurscheit could, at any time, have re-used the model, also for replicas for the open market.

The painter Carel Willink (1900-1983) included some of the works from the ensemble in question in his compositions in the early 1940s.¹²¹²H.L.C. Jaffé, Willink, Amsterdam 1986, nos. 110 and 192. At the time, this magic realist was living at 15 Ruysdaelkade, a stone’s throw from the Rijksmuseum, where the works had stood in the gardens (at various locations) since 1924.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 360b, with earlier literature; E.V. Buitenhuis, De tuinsieraadkunst in de Hollandse tuin, 1983 (unpublished thesis, Leiden University), p. 88; E. de Jong and C. Schellekens, Het beeld buiten: Vier eeuwen tuinsculptuur in Nederland, exh. cat. Heino/Wijhe (Kasteel ’t Nijenhuis) 1994, p. 79; Breedveldt Boer 2003, p. 31; P.M. Fischer, Ignatius en Jan van Logteren: Beeldhouwers en stuckunstenaars in het Amsterdam van de 18e eeuw, Alphen aan de Rijn 2005, p. 119; C. Bertram, Noord-Hollands arcadia: Ruim 400 Noord-Hollandse buitenplaatsen in tekeningen, prenten en kaarten uit de Provinciale Atlas Noord-Holland, Alphen aan den Rijn 2005, p. 63; C.W. Dubbelaar et al., ‘De brugbeelden en tuinsculpturen van Kasteel Amerongen: Materiaal, historie, conditie en conservering’, Geological Survey of Belgium Professional Paper 316 (2014), pp. 40-56, esp. p. 40

B. van der Mark, 2025, 'Jan Pieter van (I) Baurscheit, Hercules and the Hydra, Antwerp, c. 1722 - c. 1728', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200116054