Portrait of Cornelis van Aerssen (1600/02-1662), Lord of Sommelsdijk

Support The plain-weave canvas has been glue-lined. All tacking edges have been preserved, though partially trimmed. Judging by the fine crack pattern along the left and right edges the bars of the original strainer were approx. 4-5 cm wide.
Preparatory layers The single, off-white ground extends up to the tacking edges. It consists of white pigment particles with a minute addition of red earth and splinters of charcoal.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the tacking edges. A first lay-in was made with a fluid, translucent deep dark brown that has remained visible in the shadows of the face and constitutes most of the moustache. The painting was built up leaving a large reserve for the face, hair and cap, and possibly the hand as well. A broad, blunt object was used to push the blue wet paint of the sky into ridges, laying bare the brown of the initial lay-in, thus creating some of the tree’s branches. The flesh tones were carefully blended for a convincing modelling. Infrared photography showed that the skullcap was originally placed lower on the sitter’s head. Due to the increased transparency of the paint pentimenti have developed in the white collar, which was initially a lace one, and in the little finger, which was originally curled in foreshortening.
Gwen Tauber, 2022

Fair. The canvas has a few old, mended tears. The sky and foliage have turned brown. The varnish is severely discoloured.

? Commissioned by or for the sitter; ? by descent to his great-granddaughter, Elisabeth Louisa Pieck, née Van Aerssen (1714-after 1750), Brakel Manor, near Zaltbommel; ? her son, Anne Frans Willem Pieck (1736-c. 1780), with Brakel Manor; ? by whom sold to Wilhelmus Wilhelmus (1720-1771), with Brakel Manor, 1768; ? his niece, Maria Aletta van Dam, née Van Wageningen (1759-1828), with Brakel Manor, 1781; ? her son, Wilhelmus van Dam (1779-1858), with Brakel Manor, 1828, or bought by him; ? transferred to Huis Het Spijker, Brakel; ? his wife, née Ditmars van IJsselvere; transferred to The Hague, 1858; sale, C. Schiffer van Bleiswijk et al. [section dowager of W. van Dam van Brakel], The Hague (C. van Doorn), 14 December 1874 sqq., no. 79 (‘Cornelis van Aerssen, Heer van Sommelsdijk; beschr. in de ridderschap van Holland en West-Friesland, Gouverneur van Nijmegen, Kolonel bij de cavalerie. Overl. 1662.’), probably bought in; on loan from the dowager of Wilhelmus van Dam van Brakel to the Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1886-95;¹¹A. Bredius and C. Hofstede de Groot, Musée Royal de La Haye (Mauritshuis): Catalogue raisonné des tableaux et des sculptures, coll. cat. The Hague 1895, p. 143, no. 588; Verslagen omtrent ’s Rijks verzamelingen van geschiedenis en kunst 1895 (annual report of the Rijksmuseum), p. 66. her sale et al., Amsterdam (Lokaal De Zon), 29 October 1895;²²Note RMA; the sale catalogue has not been located.…; from the dealer M.J. van Gelder, Amsterdam, fl. 272.30, to the museum, with two other paintings,³³For these two pictures, SK-A-1671 and SK-A-1672, see Entry. through the mediation of the Vereniging Rembrandt, 12 December 1895⁴⁴NHA, ARM, Kop., inv. 290, pp. 165-66, no. 1335 (27 November 1895), p. 168, no. 1341 (12 December 1895).

ObjectNumber: SK-A-1670

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Vereniging Rembrandt

The man portrayed here is Cornelis van Aerssen, Lord of Sommelsdijk, Spijk, Den Bommel and De Plaat, who was born in Paris in 1600 or 1602 as the son of François van Aerssen, the Dutch envoy to France, and Petronella Borre.⁷⁷His year of birth is given as 1602 in E.W. Moes, Iconographia Batava: Beredeneerde lijst van geschilderde en gebeeldhouwde portretten van Noord-Nederlanders in vorige eeuwen, I, Amsterdam 1897, p. 8, no. 66. It is said to be 1600 in D.G. van Epen, ‘Van Aerssen’, Adelsarchief 3 (1902), pp. 161-96, esp. p. 169. Later authors alternate between those two dates. Cornelis opted for a military career at an early age. In 1627 he was a captain of horse in the States army, and in 1641 he was promoted to colonel in the cavalry. He was also governor of Nijmegen from 1647 to 1652. After his father’s death in 1641 Cornelis was admitted to the knighthood of Holland. He called the wrath of the province’s States down on his head when he supported Stadholder Willem II in his attack on Amsterdam in 1650. The delegates were only prepared to grant him amnesty if he agreed upon his family’s permanent removal from the knightage roll, to which they had only been elevated in 1613 on the insistence of Prince Maurits. After 1650, in other words, Cornelis’s political and military careers were at an end. Nevertheless, he was one of the richest people in the Dutch Republic, with his wealth in 1654 being estimated at 960,000 guilders. No fewer than 16 children were born of his marriage to Lucia van Walta (?-1674), among them 11 daughters.⁸⁸See Kingma in K. Zandvliet et al., De 250 rijksten van de Gouden Eeuw: Kapitaal, macht, familie en levensstijl, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 42-43, and for a detailed biography P.C. Molhuysen and P.J. Blok (eds.), Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, III, Leiden 1914, cols. 8-10.

Adriaen Hanneman has depicted Cornelis van Aerssen at knee length in this 1658 canvas, and in his capacity as a soldier, wearing armour and with a sword and a commander’s baton. At the time, though, he had long since retired. The artist probably first employed the device of a craggy background with a view through to a landscape in 1649, in his likeness of the English king Charles II, for example.⁹⁹The original is now lost, but there are many repetitions and variants of it; see, for example, O. ter Kuile, Adriaen Hanneman (1604-1671): Een Haags portretschilder, diss. Utrecht University 1976, pl. 30. Hanneman regularly adopted this motif in individual effigies and he undoubtedly borrowed it from his role model Anthony van Dyck.¹⁰¹⁰For example, his 1634 portrait in Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum; illustrated in S.J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven/London 2004, p. 392, no. III.202. As far as the rocky surroundings are concerned there is a close relationship with the two portraits Thomas Wentworth commissioned from Van Dyck in 1636, so Hanneman could have seen them during his stay in London (1626-c. 1638).¹¹¹¹They are, respectively, in Sussex, Petworth House, The Egremont Collection (National Trust), and in Suffolk, Euston Hall, The Duke of Grafton; illustrated in S.J. Barnes et al., Van Dyck: A Complete Catalogue of the Paintings, New Haven/London 2004, p. 598, no. IV.215, p. 599, no. IV.216. The white paint on the undersides of the branches on the rock lend depth to the landscape beyond, while the fall of light from the left subtly illuminates the area behind the sitter’s head.

The coat of arms in the top left corner, with a banderole identifying who is depicted here, is of a later date. As it combines the Van Aerssen and Van Wernhout families, it could have been added after 1712, when Cornelis’s grandson François van Aerssen van Sommelsdijk (1669-1740) married Maria van Aerssen van Wernhout (1682-1761). The same applies to the coats, again with banderoles, on the two portraits of François van Aerssen Sr (1572-1641) and Cornelis Jr (1637-1688) – the father and the youngest son of the present sitter – painted by Michiel van Mierevelt and an unknown master respectively.¹²¹²Both paintings are in the Rijksmuseum. For the sitter’s father see SK-A-3833 and for Cornelis van Aerssen Jr SK-A-1671. The latter likeness, as well as one of Cornelis Jr’s son François – the aforementioned grandson – by Mattheus Verheijden,¹³¹³SK-A-1672. was acquired at the same time as this portrait by Hanneman. The three pictures were once part of a series of nine knee-lengths that came up for auction in The Hague in 1874,¹⁴¹⁴See Provenance. and very probably belonged to Wilhelmus van Dam van Brakel (1779-1858). He was a collector who lived in a house belonging to Brakel Manor which was called ‘Het Spijker’, where he had installed a kind of private museum of works of art and objects relating to the history of the estate and its previous owners. One of them was the family of Willem Hendrik Pieck,¹⁵¹⁵J. den Draak, Het archief van de familie Van Dam van Brakel (1307-1379), 1381-1959, Arnhem 1989, pp. 2, 25; D.G. van Epen, ‘Van Aerssen’, Adelsarchief 3 (1902), pp. 161-96, esp. pp. 169, 176-77. who in 1732 married Elisabeth Louisa Van Aerssen (1714-after 1750), the daughter of the sitter’s grandson François.¹⁶¹⁶See Provenance. With her youngest brother the Van Aerssen van Sommelsdijk line died out in 1793. The portrait collection either passed to the manor by descent or was acquired by Wilhelmus van Dam van Brakel.

Richard Harmanni, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

O. ter Kuile, Adriaen Hanneman (1604-1671): Een Haags portretschilder, diss. Utrecht University 1976, pp. 97-98, no. 54, with earlier literature; Kingma in K. Zandvliet et al., De 250 rijksten van de Gouden Eeuw: Kapitaal, macht, familie en levensstijl, Amsterdam 2006, pp. 42-43

1903, p. 117, no. 1104; 1934, p. 119, no. 1104; 1976, p. 259, no. A 1670

Richard Harmanni, 2022, 'Adriaen Hanneman, Portrait of Cornelis van Aerssen (1600/02-1662), Lord of Sommelsdijk, 1658', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8618