Ferdinand Bol

Bol was the first in a long line of artists from Dordrecht to take on a second apprenticeship with Rembrandt in Amsterdam. The systematic drawing and redrawing of compositions dear to Rembrandt was one aspect of their training.

This portrait was the most cherished “Rembrandt” in the Rijksmuseum at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1911, however, it was attributed by a leading Rembrandt scholar to Ferdinand Bol.

Bol eventually traded Rembrandt’s manner in for a brighter, smoother one based on Flemish models. In his portraits, for example, he adopted poses and compositions from the highly successful court painter Sir Anthony van Dyck.

In his history paintings (basically pictures of biblical, mythological and allegorical subjects) Bol drew upon the work of the famous Fleming Peter Paul Rubens. The subject of this painting, Venus trying to dissuade her lover Adonis from departing for the hunt, and even the figure of Cupid clinging to Adonis’s leg, were derived from a work by Rubens.

Just like Rembrandt, Bol liked to dress up and hang over a balustrade. The beret and old fashioned clothing are meant to remind us of the old masters.

In the year that Rembrandt went bankrupt, 1656, Bol received the first of two lucrative commissions for the new Amsterdam Town Hall. This oil sketch may have been painted as a model for yet another commission for the Town Hall, which Bol was unsuccessful in attaining.

It was in large part thanks to his first wife’s family that Bol received the commission to paint these two monumental canvases for the Amsterdam Admiralty. Nor is it a coincidence that Bol received commissions for the Amsterdam Town Hall in the years that his wife’s grandfather was a burgomaster of that city.

A family of weapon merchants that like Bol hailed from Dordrecht, the Trips were his most important private patrons. Among the portraits he painted for them is this one in which the twenty-six-year-old Margaretha Trip dressed as Minerva, goddess of wisdom, teaches her younger sister, the eleven-year-old Anna Maria Trip.

In 1667 the Lords of the Admirality commissioned Bol to execute six identical portraits of the commander-in-chief of the Dutch fleet, Michiel de Ruyter. It was the first time that a naval hero was publicly honoured in a series of official portraits.

Bol painted this self-portrait for his soon to be second wife, a very wealthy widow named Anna van Arckel. It may be his last painting, for after his wedding he appears to have hung up his palette and paint brushes for good.