Jacob van der Does I (Amsterdam 1623 - Sloten, near Amsterdam 1673)

He was born on 4 March 1623, the son of Simon van der Does (1589-1648), secretary to the board of insurers in Amsterdam, and Beatrix Anselmo Anthonsdr (1594-?). Jacob studied painting with Claes Moeyaert (1591-1669) in Amsterdam. He is said also to have enrolled in Leiden University in 1644, but this cannot be confirmed by documents.⁵⁵E. Buijsen (ed.), Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw. Het Hoogsteder lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag, 1600-1700, Zwolle 1998, p. 300; P. Schatborn, with J. Verberne, Drawn to Warmth: 17th-century Dutch Artists in Italy, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001, p. 209 (n. 2).

Among his earliest dated works is a painting from 1641, Shepherd with Sheep, Goats and a Cow, formerly on the London art market.⁶⁶Sale, London (Christie’s South Kensington), 14 December 2001, no. 16. That Van der Does played a leading role in the development of the Italianate pastoral animal piece is suggested by that picture’s stylistic resemblance to works by Paulus Potter (1625-1654), Karel Dujardin (1626-1678) and Adriaen van der Velde (1636-1672) – by none of whom is there a surviving work known from this early period.

According to Houbraken, Van der Does left for France at the age of twenty-one and continued on foot to Italy; this must have been in 1644 or 1645. During the five years he spent in Rome, where he was a member of the Schildersbent or Bentvueghels, he practised drawing and painting, following the example of Pieter van Laer (1599-1642). Because of his short stature and unrealized dream of becoming a soldier, he was given the bent-name ‘Tamboer’ (‘Drummerboy’).

By 1650, he must have returned to the Netherlands, where he is documented as living on the Lelygracht in Amsterdam. In Haarlem on 22 March 1650, he married the amateur artist Margaretha Dirksdr Boortens (1630-1661). Both were members of the Reformed Church. Shortly thereafter, the couple settled in The Hague, where Margaretha had grown up as the daughter of the advocate Dirck Dircksz Boortens (c. 1600-1647). Through her mother, she was related to Jacob van Campen (c. 1608-after 1660), who may have inspired her love of drawing and painting.

In 1656, Van der Does was one of the founding members of the Confrerie Pictura, the artists’ society of The Hague, of which he served as a warden (1656/57, 1658/59) and later as dean (1659/60, 1660/61). According to Houbraken, his wife’s death and the loss of her 700-guilder annuity affected the artist so deeply that he stopped painting and drawing for a four-year period; he suffered from financial difficulties the rest of his life.⁷⁷In May 1661, Jacob sold to his sister-in-law Maria Boortens (c. 1626/27-after 1678) a share of two houses and homesteads in the Sint Jacobsstraat, Amsterdam; Amsterdam, Stadsarchief, Transportakten voor 1811; NL-SAA-21627076. In 1662, he married, as his second wife, Johanna van Geesdorp Gideonsdr (?-?), who died shortly after the birth of their four children. Among the seven children of his first marriage were two sons who became artists, Simon van der Does (1653-after 1718) and Jacob van der Does II (1654-1699); of the children of his second marriage, only Gideon van der Does (?-?) reached adulthood. In 1663, Jacob I returned to Amsterdam and, through the intervention of influential friends, was appointed secretary of Sloten and Sloterdijk. After that, he resumed drawing, his latest works dating from 1672, for instance Two Shepherdesses Resting with their Flock near a Ruin in the Teylers Museum, Haarlem (inv. no. Q+ 002).⁸⁸M.C. Plomp, The Dutch Drawings in the Teyler Museum, II: Artists Born between 1575 and 1630, coll. cat. Haarlem 1997, no. 110. He died on 17 November 1673 in Sloten.

Van der Does’s paintings, mainly pastoral landscapes with cattle and sheep, were highly appreciated by his contemporaries, as well as by eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century collectors. He was known as painter of the ‘duizendguldensgeit’ (‘1000 guilder goat’), named after the price that one such painting of a goat fetched. Weyerman nicknamed him the ‘Dutch Castiglione’. Houbraken claimed that ‘nobody surpassed him in the depiction of sheep, naturally in both drawing and painting’.⁹⁹A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718–21, II (1719), p. 108 (‘en dat niemant in ’t schilderen van Schaapjes, zoo in natuurlyke teekening als wyze van schilderen, hem te boven gaat’). Despite diverging opinions on painting, Van der Does was close friends with Karel Dujardin, who was appointed guardian to his children after his first wife’s death; Houbraken reported that Dujardin preferred ‘clear’ colours, while Van der Does favoured a ‘brown’ (i.e. dark) manner of painting. Among the artist’s other friends was the diplomat Cornelis de Montigny de Glarges (1599-1683), to whose album amicorum, preserved in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, The Hague, he contributed a drawing and Latin verses, as did his first wife, Margaretha Boortens, and her sister Maria.¹⁰¹⁰Inv. no. 75 J 48-I, fol. 128 (23 October 1659); P. Schatborn, with J. Verberne, Drawn to Warmth: 17th-century Dutch Artists in Italy, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001, p. 136, fig. G; for Maria and Margaretha Boortens, cf. M. Huiskamp, ‘Boortens, Maria’, in Digitaal Vrouwenlexicon van Nederland; online at http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/vrouwenlexicon/lemmata/data/Boortens. Another famous album amicorum, that of Jacob Heyblocq (1623-1690), director of Amsterdam’s Latin School, also in the Koninklijke Bibliotheek, contains two drawings by Van der Does, dated 1666, accompanied by verses in French and Italian.¹¹¹¹Inv. no. 131 H 26, fol. 291 (18 September 1666) and fols. 297-98 (9 October 1666); cf. the facsimile edn. by K. Thomassen and J.A. Gruys (eds.), The Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq: Introduction, Transcriptions, Paraphrases & Notes to the Facsimile, 2 vols., Zwolle 1998. He made only one etching, Five Sheep, dated 1650.

Besides his sons Simon and Jacob II, Van der Does’s pupils were Marcus de Bye (1638/39-after 1688) in 1658, the same year as the little-known Gamaliel Day (active 1658); Alexander Havelaer (1640/45-1686), who was in the studio in 1659; and Anthony Schinckels (active 1658-60) and Theodorus Bernoille (active 1661), students in 1660 and 1661, respectively.

Annemarie Stefes, 2018

References
A. Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1718-21, II (1719), pp. 105-08; J.C. Weyerman, De levens-beschryvingen der Nederlandsche konst-schilders en konst-schilderessen, 4 vols., The Hague/Dordrecht 1729-69, IV (1769), p. 38; P. Terwesten, Register off aanteekeninge zo van de Deekens, Hoofdluiden en Secretarissen der Kunst-Confrerie Kamer van Pictura, The Hague 1776 (unpublished manuscript, Archive of Confrerie Pictura, Gemeentearchief, The Hauge), p. 6; J. Immerzeel, De levens en werken der Hollandsche en Vlaamsche kunstschilders, 3 vols., Amsterdam 1842-43, I (1842), pp. 186-87; A. Bredius in F.D.O. Obreen, Archief voor Nederlandsche kunstgeschiedenis, 7 vols., Rotterdam 1877-90, IV (1881-82), pp. 55, 57-61, 64, 76-79, 81-82, 100, 118, 125, 134, 148; V (1882-83), pp. 84, 110, 130, 144-46, 153; VII (1888-90), p. 192; A.D. de Vries, ‘Biografische aanteekeningen betreffende voornamelijk Amsterdamsche Schilders, Plaatsnijders, enz. en hunne verwanten (I)’, Oud Holland 3 (1885), p. 68; U. Thieme and F. Becker, Allgemeines Lexikon der bildenden Künstler: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, 37 vols., Leipzig 1907-50, IX (1913), pp. 374-75 (entry by H. Wichmann); A. Bredius (ed.), Künstler-Inventare: Urkunden zur Geschichte der holländischen Kunst des XVIten, XVIIten und XVIIIten Jahrhunderts, 8 vols., The Hague 1915-22, III (1917), pp. 854-55; VI (1919), pp. 1986, 2037; P.C. Molhuysen et al. (eds.), Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, 10 vols., Leiden 1911-37, VI (1924), p. 423; F.W.H. Hollstein et al., Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, c. 1450-1700, 72 vols, Amsterdam and elsewhere 1947-2010, V (1951), pp. 248-49; C. Boschma (ed.), Meesterlijk vee. Nederlandse veeschilders, 1600-1900, exh. cat. Dordrecht (Dordrechts Museum)/Leeuwarden (Fries Museum) 1988-89, pp. 423-24; E. Buijsen (ed.), Haagse schilders in de Gouden Eeuw. Het Hoogsteder lexicon van alle schilders werkzaam in Den Haag, 1600-1700, Zwolle 1998, p. 300; P. Schatborn, with J. Verberne, Drawn to Warmth: 17th-century Dutch Artists in Italy, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001, pp. 132-37; A. Beyer et al. (eds.), Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon: Die bildenden Künstler aller Zeiten und Völker, Munich 1992-, XXVIII (2001), p. 261 (entry by C. Kemmer); P. Groenendijk, Beknopt biografisch lexicon van Zuid- en Noord-Nederlandse schilders, graveurs, glasschilders, tapijtwevers et cetera van ca. 1350 tot ca. 1720, Utrecht 2008, p. 268