Portrait of Sir Pieter Courten (1581-1630)

The support is an oak panel, consisting of three planks with a vertical grain and is bevelled on all sides. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1610. The panel could have been ready for use by 1621, but a date in or after 1627 is more likely. The ground layer is thin and off-white in colour. Light grey dead-colouring can be seen under the sitter’s face. The paint was applied smoothly, and transparently in the sitter’s collar.

Poor. The sitter’s face has been overpainted entirely. There are three vertical cracks in the panel, retouching along the cracks and the left join, and pinpoint losses throughout. The varnish is discoloured, and is matte at the retouchings.

...; ? documented at Kasteel Popkensburg in an 18th-century manuscript;¹¹RAU, PA 26, Des Tombe archive, inv. no. 18, ‘Genealogieën, genealogische en heraldische aantekeningen betreffende de familie van Citters en aanverwante families, (17e-19e eeuw): Boudaen (Courten), Walleran Sandra, Fourmenois, Buteux, Hoeufft’, no. 4: ‘Pieter Courten getrouwt met Hor: tot Prado Wed: Jan Fourmenois ons grootmoeder hij boude het groote huijs. Joh. Boudaen 1629’. ? by descent through the families Boudaen Courten; Van Citters; Verheije van Citters to Jonkheer Jacob de Witte van Citters (1817-76), The Hague; by whom bequeathed to the museum, but given in usufruct to his sister Carolina Hester de Witte van Citters (1820-1901), The Hague, 1876;²²RAU, PA 26, Des Tombe archive, inv. no. 1038, ‘Testament van Jacob de Witte van Citters’, 16 June 1875. her husband Arnoldus Andries des Tombe (1818-1902); transferred to the museum, as attributed to Salomon Mesdach, 1903

ObjectNumber: SK-A-2074

Credit line: Jonkheer J. de Witte van Citters Bequest, The Hague

Sir Pieter Courten was the son of Guillaume Courten and Margarita Cassier.⁵⁵For their portraits see SK-A-904 and SK-A-905. The coat of arms on the back of his portrait is that of the Courten family; see CBG database. He married a widow, Hortensia del Prado, in Cologne, and settled with her in Middelburg, where they lived in ‘Het Grote Huis’ in Lange Noordstraat, which Courten had commissioned.⁶⁶Probably around 1613, according to Nagtglas II, 1893, p. 437. A few houses away lived the poet Jacob Cats, who was a member of their circle. Hortensia del Prado was the model for the virtuous wife whose praises Cats sang in his Houwelyck (Marriage).⁷⁷Ed. Kleef 1628, p. 123, note. No children were born to the couple. After Hortensia’s death in 1627, Pieter Courten married Elisabeth Honing on 17 March 1629. According to his nephew Pieter Boudaen Courten,⁸⁸For whose portrait see SK-A-2068. Pieter Courten fell ill in October of the same year, and died, ‘wasted away’, on 12 January 1630.⁹⁹Wuestman 2005, p. 54: ‘(...) uijtgeteert’.

This portrait of Pieter Courten (shown here) comes from the De Witte van Citters Bequest and entered the museum in 1903. Oddly enough, it has never been associated with that of his wife Hortensia del Prado (SK-A-910), which arrived in the museum from the same family collection nearly 20 years earlier.¹⁰¹⁰On the back of Hortensia del Prado’s portrait are the coats of arms of the Fourmenois family, a coat that is probably a composite of the arms of the Del Prado family (quarter 1) and the Pellicorne family (quarter 2), and a coat that may be a composite of the arms of the Courten family (quarters 1 and 4) and of the Cassier family (quarters 2 and 3). The paintings have the same dimensions, very similar frames, and the same compositional setting of an oval, stone framework. Given the dates of death of the two individuals and the differences in the frames, it can be assumed that the two paintings were not made at the same time. Courten’s portrait, with the inscription ‘1630’, must be posthumous, painted either in 1630, the year of his death, or even later. The undated portrait of his wife, who died three years before him, must date from the 1620s, for Hortensia del Prado is wearing the fashion of that period.¹¹¹¹Wardle 1985, p. 207. Bianca du Mortier has suggested that the absence of jewellery may indicate that Hortensia was in mourning; oral communication, 2004. For her cap trimmed with black lace see Der Kinderen-Besier 1950, p. 61; De Winkel in Amsterdam 2002, p. 120.

It is possible that the portraits in the Rijksmuseum served as companion pieces. An 18th-century list of paintings in Kasteel Popkensburg mentions the portraits of Pieter Courten and Hortensia del Prado one after the other.¹²¹²See Provenance. According to that list, both works had an inscription by Johan Boudaen Courten.¹³¹³The dates ‘1628’ and ‘1629’ are clearly incorrect readings of ‘1678’ and ‘1679’, just as ‘Zr.’ (‘Zaliger’, meaning: ‘the late’) was misinterpreted as ‘zuster’ (‘sister’). The strip of vellum with this text is still on the back of Hortensia’s portrait, but it is missing from Pieter Courten’s. It could have been removed, or possibly there was another version of the same portrait, although none is known.

The likeliest people to have commissioned the portraits of Pieter Courten and Hortensia del Prado in Popkensburg are Pieter Boudaen Courten and his wife Catharina Fourmenois. Boudaen Courten was Pieter Courten’s nephew and heir, and Fourmenois was Del Prado’s daughter. The labels written by their son Johan show that both works were in the Boudaen Courten family at an early date.

The portraits of Courten and Del Prado have both been associated with the Middelburg painter Salomon Mesdach. The one of Hortensia del Prado, in particular, displays similarities to the paintings attributed to Mesdach in the Rijksmuseum as regards style and the structure of the paint layers.¹⁴¹⁴See the entry on SK-A-2068. Courten’s portrait is built up in a similar way, with light grey dead-colouring beneath the face and the ruff, but it is hard to say whether the painting is by the same hand, since the face has been heavily overpainted. Ekkart assumes that it is a later copy, partly on the evidence of the weak execution of the ruff, the folds of which were not properly understood.¹⁵¹⁵Oral communication, 2004. However, the condition of the painting and the lack of an original preclude a definitive pronouncement.

There is a second version of Hortensia’s portrait, possibly a replica.¹⁶¹⁶Private collection, panel, 73 x 59 cm; photo IB. A modern copy of her portrait by Aat Veldhoen (1934-) was auctioned in 1998.¹⁷¹⁷Sale, Amsterdam (De Zwaan), 10 March 1998, p. 53, no. 4586 (ill.). The Rijksmuseum has two other portraits of Hortensia del Prado, by Gortzius Geldorp (SK-A-2072 and SK-A-2081) as well as a copper shield of 1625 with the arms of the Del Prado and Courten families (SK-A-928).

Gerdien Wuestman, 2007

See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues
See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements

This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 180.

Wuestman 2005, pp. 46, 48, notes 6, 7

1903, p. 20, no. 208; 1976, p. 660, no. A 2074 (as Northern Netherlands School, 1630); 2007, no. 180

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'circle of Salomon Mesdach, Portrait of Sir Pieter Courten (1581-1630), 1630', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4770