Engraved and carved in relief and mounted into the lid of a silver tobacco-box at a later stage.

Good.

…; I.H. de Bruijn, 1932;¹¹I.H. de Bruijn acquired the box in 1932 from the estate of his uncle’s widow, Note RMA. donated by Mr and Mrs De Bruijn-Van der Leeuw, Spiez, to the museum, 1961

Object number: BK-1961-6

Credit line: De Bruijn-van der Leeuw Bequest, Muri, Switzerland

The lid of this silver tobacco-box is formed by a mother-of-pearl plaquette signed by Jan Bernard Barckhuysen (c. 1684-1760). From 1717 to 1745 Barckhuysen was a seal engraver at the Guelders Mint in Harderwijk.²²For Barckhuysen, see W.H. van Seters, ‘Parelmoerkunstenaars in de 18de eeuw: Het werk van J.B. Barckhuysen, J.C. Konsé en C. la Motte’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 17 (1966), pp. 247-63, esp. pp. 248-59 and J. Verbeek, ‘J.B. Barckhuysen (ca. 1684-1760): Parelmoersnijder’, Antiek 7 (1972), pp. 277- 86. He made his countless works in mother-of-pearl in his spare time. Despite the somewhat varying quality of his oeuvre, he, together with Johannes Christiaan Konsé (1700-1758) and Cornelis la Motte (1740-1804), Barkhuysen is considered to be one of the foremost carvers of mother-of-pearl carvers working in the Netherlands in the eighteenth century.

Barckhuysen hardly ever made his own designs, if at all, but generally based them on existing engravings. In this case it was a 1718 print by Bernard Picart (RP-P-OB-24.530) with, at the top, Christ on a rainbow, appearing before the female personifications of the four parts of the world. The amazed men, Aaron and Moses, in the background, left, symbolize Judaism. In the background, right, Idolatry is fleeing. As stated in the inscription on the scroll of one of the angels, the scene is derived from Isaiah (45:22) in which ‘all the ends of the earth’³³alle gy lieden der aerde. are called upon to turn to God.

For this representation, Barckhuysen combined two techniques to improve the spatial depth: the foreground with the figures is carved in relief, while the background is applied using line engraving. Barckhuysen is thought to have sold his plaquettes unmounted.⁴⁴W.H. van Seters, ‘Parelmoerkunstenaars in de 18de eeuw: Het werk van J.B. Barckhuysen, J.C. Konsé en C. la Motte’, Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 17 (1966), pp. 247-63, p. 256. Still, they were probably intended to decorate a silver object from the start, since he gave them a suitable geometrical, in this case octagonal, shape which was easy to mount.⁵⁵As opposed to most of the plaquettes by his 17th-century colleague Cornelis Bellekin which still have the original shell-shape, cf. BK-NM-616, for instance. The silver tobacco-box in which the plaquette is mounted, bears the master’s mark PS of Peter Schemkes, the hallmark of Zutphen and the date letter 4/Z (=1750), which gives a reliable terminus ante quem.⁶⁶J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, p. 296. However, the relief can be of a substantial earlier date, as is the case with a plaquette by Barckhuysen featuring Flora and Zephyr which was mounted to a silver box in 1786, long after the artist had died.⁷⁷Silver box by the Amsterdam silversmith Cornelis Rudolf Stolting, see sale Amsterdam (Sotheby’s), 27 June 2007, no. 80.

Bieke van der Mark, 2025

J. Leeuwenberg with the assistance of W. Halsema-Kubes, Beeldhouwkunst in het Rijksmuseum, coll. cat. Amsterdam 1973, no. 415, with earlier literature

B. van der Mark, 2025, 'Ian Bernhard Barckhuysen and Peter Schemkes, Christ Appears Before the Personifications of the Parts of the World, Lid of a Tobacco-Box, HarderwijkZutphen (stad), c. 1730 - c. 1750', in F. Scholten and B. van der Mark (eds.), European Sculpture in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20032992