Sculpted.

Flawless.

…; bequeathed to the museum by the sitter, 1844

Object number: BK-B-12

Credit line: C. Apostool Bequest, Amsterdam

In 1808 King Louis Napoleon and the Royal Institute of Science, Letters and Fine Arts were looking for a young man who could be trained in Paris and Rome to be a sculptor.¹¹M. Boomkamp, ‘Paul Joseph Gabriël (1784-1833): Revitalizing Dutch Sculpture in the Early Nineteenth Century’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 58 (2010), pp. 328-65, esp. pp. 329-31. No sculptors of any note were active in the Netherlands at that time, nor was there anywhere in the country where an aspiring sculptor could be trained. Paulus Joseph (‘Paul’) Gabriël (1784-1833) was selected, and in 1809 he left for Paris. He spent two years studying with the sculptor Pierre Cartellier before leaving for a further two years in Rome, where the leading sculptors were the Italian Antonio Canova and the Dane Bertel Thorvaldsen.

Although Gabriël was invited to settle in Paris with Cartellier in 1813,²²Cf. the original letters from Pierre Cartellier to Paul Joseph Gabriël in the Rijksmuseum’s archive, inv. no. RP-D-2007-42-3, 24 June 1816 and inv. no. RP-D-2007-42-7, s.a. the prospect of positions such as Amsterdam’s municipal sculptor and Royal Sculptor enticed him back to the north. The former appointment indeed materialised in 1814;³³Cf. the original contract between the city of Amsterdam and Paulus Joseph Gabriël, in the Rijksmuseum’s archive, inv. no. RP-D-2007-42-21, 26 November 1814. he was not confirmed as Royal Sculptor until many years later, although he was granted an annual stipend from 1814 onwards.⁴⁴Cf. the original letter of the clerk of the state secretary of King William I, Elias Schoorl, in the Rijksmuseum’s archive, inv. no. RP-D-2007-42-28, 24 May 1824. He received few commissions during the early years after his return to the Netherlands. Most were for portraits of and for members of the Royal Institute, a project driven chiefly by Admiral Jan Hendrik van Kinsbergen, whose likeness Gabriël produced in 1816. In 1817-18 he made busts of Pieter Cornelisz Hooft, Hugo Grotius, Peter Paul Rubens, Christiaan Huygens and Herman Boerhaave for the institute’s library.

This portrait of Cornelis Apostool (1762-1844) dates from the same period. In 1807 Apostool had been appointed secretary of the Dutch diplomatic mission in Naples.⁵⁵M. Jonker, ‘Cornelis Apostool (1762-1844), cultureel ambtenaar’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 25 (1977), pp. 97-112, esp. p. 100. He returned to the Low Countries the following year to become the first director of the Royal Museum in Amsterdam, the precursor of the Rijksmuseum. A prominent member of the Fourth Class of Fine Arts and Music of the Royal Institute, in 1817 he became a co-founder of the Royal Academy in Amsterdam, of which Gabriël would be appointed director of sculpture.

Gabriël’s portrait of Apostool is executed in the form of a herm bust; that is, the marble block is cut straight off below the neck on all four sides, thus omitting the springing points of the arms. In ancient Greece, a herm or hermaion was a roadside pile of stones dedicated to the god Hermes, placed there to guide travellers. This symbolic ‘sentinel’ later metamorphosed into a block-shaped column surmounted by a bust and frequently endowed with a phallus. In later herm busts, the body appears to emerge organically from the block-shaped plinth. Herm busts were frequently used in antiquity for portraits of philosophers. The painter Wouterus Mol (1785-1857), whom Gabriël had met while studying in Paris, made a portrait of Gabriël in 1818, with a classical herm bust in the background (SK-A-2121).

Greek sculpture was the main source of inspiration for sculptors in the early nineteenth century; herm busts were popular for portraits of artists and art lovers, making this an appropriate form for a man like Apostool. Gabriël undoubtedly knew portraits of this kind from Cartellier in Paris and Thorvaldsen in Rome. He did allow himself a certain latitude, breaking with the rigid frontal perspective of the classical herm bust by depicting the subject’s face turned slightly to the right. Possibly Gabriël drew inspiration here from the self-portrait on which Canova was engaged during the Dutchman’s stay in Rome.

Margreet Boomkamp 2017 (updated by Bieke van der Mark in 2026)
This entry was originally published in J. Reynaerts (ed.), 1800-1900, coll. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2017, no. 16

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 436, with earlier literature; M. Jonker, ‘Cornelis Apostool (1762-1844), cultureel ambtenaar’, Bulletin van het Rijksmuseum 25 (1977), pp. 97-112; F. Scholten, Gebeeldhouwde portretten/Portrait Sculptures, coll. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1995, no. 46; Boomkamp in G. van der Ham et al., Netherlandish Art in the Rijksmuseum 1800-1900, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2009, no. 19; M. Boomkamp, ‘Paul Joseph Gabriël (1784-1833): Revitalizing Dutch Sculpture in the Early Nineteenth Century’, The Rijksmuseum Bulletin 58 (2010), pp. 328-65; Boomkamp in J. Reynaerts (ed.), 1800-1900, coll. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2017, no. 16

M. Boomkamp, 2026, 'Paulus Joseph Gabriël, Portrait of Cornelis Apostool (1762-1844) _, Amsterdam, c. 1817', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), _European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/200741