Portrait of a Young Man, possibly Jacob Francken (1627-after 1656)

Support The panel consists of three vertically grained oak planks (approx. 17, 32.2 and 19 cm), approx. 0.7 cm thick. The top edge had been trimmed before an oak strip (approx. 2 cm) was added at a later date, presumably to fit the panel into a frame. The reverse is slightly bevelled at the bottom and on the left and right, and has regularly spaced saw marks. Dendrochronology has shown that the youngest heartwood ring was formed in 1625. The panel could have been ready for use by 1636, but a date in or after 1642 is more likely.
Preparatory layers The triple ground extends up to the edges of the support. The first layer is a solid, somewhat transparent warm beige. The second ground is a warm beige consisting of white, fine black and a few fine orange pigment particles. The third layer is a warm greyish brown containing white, dark red and yellow pigment particles.
Underdrawing No underdrawing could be detected with the naked eye or infrared photography.
Paint layers The paint extends up to the edges of the support. The composition was built up from the back to the front. A dark paint, possibly the undermodelling, shimmers through, especially in the head; it was left uncovered in several places, for example around the nose and mouth. The figure was reserved in the background and the collar was left in reserve in the clothes. The paint was applied wet in wet, leaving the handling of the brush visible. The background, in particular, has remained very loose and open, sometimes exposing the ground. The paints are quite opaque overall, except for dark shadows over skin colours. The flesh colours of the face were smoothly applied, in very opaque yellowish and pinkish tones. A drier paint was used for the tufts of hair falling over the forehead and touching the cheeks. Texture is apparent in the hand and face, and was also used for modelling in the black clothes and the thickly executed bonnet. The golden highlights of the brocade on the clothes consist of numerous thick and flowing medium-rich ochre-coloured paints. The sitter’s left eyebrow was placed higher than planned in the undermodelling and the wrist was made broader than its reserve.
Willem de Ridder, 2022

Good. The panel is somewhat fragile and a crack is visible at the top, to the right of centre. The left join is open at the top and bottom, the right one only at the bottom. At some point, they were strengthened by canvas strips, wax-resin attached to the panel. There are two small bumps above and slightly to the right of the bonnet. Its thick paint has a very marked craquelure. Slight abrasions of the paint layer throughout have mostly been retouched.

? commissioned by Jacob Francken (1627-after 1656) or his parents Sebastiaan Francken and Jacobmijne van Casteren, with pendant portrait of his sister Elisabeth Francken (1629-1678), 1651;¹¹See Entry. ? probate inventory, Elisabeth Francken (‘Int sijsalet. Twee achtkantige schilderijen sijnde de Conter:feytsels van d’heer m’ Jacob Francken ende juff’ Elisabeth Francken za[lig]er door Cuyp’), 12 September 1678;²²RAD, ONA 187, ‘Inventaris van goederen van Elisabeth Francken, echtgenote van Kapitein Thomas Rijkers’; GPI, N-1475.…; from Albertus Brondgeest, Amsterdam fl. 1,900, to Adriaan van der Hoop (1778-1854), Amsterdam, November 1839;³³Lijst van schilderijen, beelden en teekeningen van Adriaan van der Hoop te Amsterdam, NHA, ARS, no. 388 (copy in Rijksmuseum Research Library), no. 191: ‘Een zeer fraay Mans portret door A: Cuyp. zynde zoo uitvoerig & krachtig dat het zoude kunnen doorgaan voor een schildery van Rembrand. in het begin van Nov: gekocht van A: Brondgeest voor fl 1900’. by whom bequeathed to the City of Amsterdam, with 223 other paintings, 1854;⁴⁴Taxatie van schilderijen, teekeningen en beeldhouwwerken gedaan door Pieter E.H. Praetorius en Gerrit de Vries Jz., executeuren van het testament van A. van der Hoop [...] 29 april 1854, NHA, ARS, no. 388 (copy in Rijksmuseum Research Library), p. 3, no. 191: ‘A. Cuyp, Portret van eenen krijgsman, fl. 150’. on loan from the City of Amsterdam to the museum since 30 June 1885⁵⁵Provenance from 1839 to the present reconstructed in A. Pollmer, ‘Catalogus van de schilderijen in de verzameling van Adriaan van der Hoop’, in E. Bergvelt et al., De Hollandse meesters van een Amsterdamse bankier: De verzameling van Adriaan van der Hoop (1778-1854), exh. cat. Amsterdam (Amsterdams Historisch Museum; Rijksmuseum) 2004-05, pp. 135-95, esp. p. 144, no. 36.

ObjectNumber: SK-C-120

Credit line: On loan from the City of Amsterdam (A. van der Hoop Bequest)

This portrait of a young man in sumptuous imaginary dress painted by Aelbert Cuyp probably had a pendant originally in the shape of a likeness of a 21-year-old woman dated 1651 in a private collection size (fig. a).¹¹¹¹That portrait is inscribed ‘Aetatis. 21 / A.cuijp. fecit. / 1651’. This is suggested not only by the similar dimensions but also by the costumes and attributes, which associate the figures with hunting.¹²¹²See Wheelock in A.K. Wheelock Jr (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001-02, p. 144. The sitters remain unidentified, but it seems that they could well be the brother and sister Jacob (1627-after 1656) and Elisabeth Francken (1629-1678), the eldest children of Jacobmijne van Casteren and Sebastiaan Francken (1597-1651), a justice at the Court of Holland. Elisabeth died on 20 May 1678, and her probate inventory of that year lists two octagonal portraits of her and Jacob by someone called Cuyp, which are probably these companion pieces.¹³¹³See Provenance. They are on oval panels, but these were often set in octagonal frames and were described as such in inventories.¹⁴¹⁴De Bruyn Kops in P.J.J. van Thiel and C.J. de Bruyn Kops, Prijst de lijst: De Hollandse schilderijlijst in de zeventiende eeuw, exh. cat. Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 1984, pp. 114-18; De Bruyn Kops in P.J.J. van Thiel and C.J. de Bruyn Kops, Framing in the Golden Age: Picture and Frame in 17th-Century Holland, Zwolle 1995, pp. 160-64. A more important argument is provided by the inscription on the woman’s picture, which states that she was 21 in 1651, which is a precise match for Elisabeth, who was baptized on 1 December 1629.

This was not the first time that the two Francken children were portrayed. There is a painting of 1635 by Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp in which both of them, aged 6 and 8, and their younger sister Cornelia (1633-before c. 1640) are seen in a landscape near The Hague.¹⁵¹⁵Dordrechts Museum, on loan from Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam; illustrated in S. Paarlberg (ed.), Jacob Gerritsz. Cuyp (1594-1652), exh. cat. Dordrecht (Dordrechts Museum) 2002, p. 111. It is mentioned in Elisabeth’s inventory as well.¹⁶¹⁶For the identification of the sitters see Ekkart in J.B. Bedaux and R.E.O. Ekkart (eds.), Pride and Joy: Children’s Portraits in the Netherlands 1500-1700, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum)/Antwerp (Royal Museum of Fine Arts) 2000-01, pp. 154-57, no. 29. Another work that is listed there was made by Pieter Codde and shows the Francken family on the beach at Scheveningen.¹⁷¹⁷Present whereabouts unknown; illustrated in J. Loughman, ‘Een stad en haar kunstconsumptie: Openbare en privé-verzamelingen in Dordrecht, 1620-1719’, in P. Marijnissen et al. (eds.), De zichtbaere werelt: Schilderkunst uit de Gouden Eeuw in Hollands oudste stad, exh. cat. Dordrecht (Dordrechts Museum) 1992-93, pp. 34-64, esp. p. 61. Cornelia is missing, and Roelof, born in 1635, is the youngest now. The painting is undated, but given the apparent ages of the children it would be from 1638-42.¹⁸¹⁸Ekkart dates it c. 1638-39 in J.B. Bedaux and R.E.O. Ekkart (eds.), Pride and Joy: Children’s Portraits in the Netherlands 1500-1700, exh. cat. Haarlem (Frans Hals Museum)/Antwerp (Royal Museum of Fine Arts) 2000-01, p. 154. Elisabeth and Jacob are once again depicted as remarkably close siblings. Jacob, attended by a couple of hounds, is holding up a dead hare behind his sister’s back.

The panel in the Rijksmuseum is notable for its relatively strong chiaroscuro effects and the loose but deft brushwork. Both the costume and face are a little more striking and livelier than in Cuyp’s earliest portraits of 1649.¹⁹¹⁹Portrait of Cornelis van Someren, London, The National Gallery; illustrated in N. MacLaren, The Dutch School: 1600-1900, coll. cat. London (The National Gallery) 1991, II, pl. 74. For the identification of the sitter see J. Loughman, ‘New Light on Some Portraits by Aelbert Cuyp’, The Burlington Magazine 150 (2008), pp. 584-91, esp. pp. 584-85. And Portrait of Anna Blocken, Minneapolis Institute of Art; illustrated in ibid., p. 585. Wheelock has suggested that in the present picture Cuyp may have been inspired by the two Dordrecht artists Ferdinand Bol and Paulus Lesire and their paintings of the 1640s ‘in which sitters are similarly modelled in strong light and dressed in exotic costumes’.²⁰²⁰Wheelock in A.K. Wheelock Jr (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001-02, p. 144. Examples include Ferdinand Bol’s 1647 pendants Aeneas Hunting and Dido Hunting in Greenwich, Ranger’s House, and Stockholm, Bergsten collection, respectively; illustrated in A. Blankert, Ferdinand Bol (1616-1680): Rembrandt’s Pupil, Doornspijk 1982, pls. 9, 10. The young man, who is shown half-length turned one quarter to the right, is wearing a black doublet with the sleeves slashed and edged with gold braid, an ornate small collar, a white, gold-fringed neckerchief, and a bonnet decorated with two ostrich plumes. He is holding the barrel of a gun in his left hand. The woman in the presumed companion piece is dressed equally sumptuously. She is holding the game: a pair of songbirds tied together with willow twigs. Hunting is often associated with love and courtship in emblems and pastoral poetry, which is why Wheelock thought that the pendants must have been made to mark a marriage or betrothal,²¹²¹Wheelock in A.K. Wheelock Jr (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, exh. cat. Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001-02, p. 144. but in fact these are probably a brother and sister who were fond of hunting, as illustrated by Codde’s family portrait. Be that as it may, the pictures testify to the aristocratic pretensions of the Franckens, who owned the Hoeckenburg country estate on the Haagse Trekvliet near Voorburg.

Erlend de Groot, 2022

See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements

E.-J.-T. Thoré (pseud. W. Bürger), Musées de la Hollande, II, Paris 1860, p. 144; C. Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes und kritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten holländischen Maler des XVII. Jahrhunderts, II, Esslingen/Paris 1908, p. 41, no. 127; A. Chong, Aelbert Cuyp and the Meaning of Landscape, diss. New York University 1992, p. 336, no. 93; Wheelock in A.K. Wheelock Jr (ed.), Aelbert Cuyp, Washington (National Gallery of Art)/London (The National Gallery)/Amsterdam (Rijksmuseum) 2001-02, pp. 144-45, 198; W.T. Kloek, Aelbert Cuyp: Land, Water, Light, Amsterdam 2002, pp. 18-19

1887, p. 33, no. 254; 1903, p. 79, no. 748; 1934, p. 77, no. 748; 1960, p. 79, no. 748; 1976, p. 184, no. C 120

Erlend de Groot, 2022, 'Aelbert Cuyp, Portrait of a Young Man, possibly Jacob Francken (1627-after 1656), c. 1651', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8189