The support is an oak panel consisting of three vertically grained planks. There are bevels along the top and bottom edges. The ground appears to be whitish. Raking light revealed the outlines of an earlier portrait of roughly the same size. X-radiographs showed this to be of a figure with a lace ruff and cuffs. The figure’s right arm is held close to the body. The right hand seems to be holding an octavo-size book. The position of the left arm also deviates from that of the man in the top most paint layer. The paint was applied smoothly, with some visible brushmarking.

Fair. The left panel join is open. There are discoloured fillings, overpainting and retouching along the panel joins, as well as small losses throughout. The uneven varnish layer has discoloured.

…; by descent to Jonkheer Jacob de Witte van Citters (1817-76), The Hague; by whom bequeathed to the Nederlandsch Museum voor Geschiedenis en Kunst, The Hague, 1876, but given in usufruct to his sister Carolina Hester de Witte van Citters (1820-1901), The Hague; her husband Arnoldus Andries des Tombe (1818-1902), The Hague; transferred to the museum in 1903

Object number: SK-A-2075

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

According to the inscription on the back of the panel, this is a portrait of Johan van Ceters.¹¹‘Jehan’ was probably the form of his Christian name that he used in France. The coat of arms at top left is that of the Van Ceters or Van Citters family.²²Database CBG. Johan, the son of Aernout van Ceters, Lord van Gapinge³³The Rijksmuseum has his portrait by Philip van Dijk, SK-A-893, which was probably painted after an early 17th-century prototype. and his third wife Anna van der Hooghe, was studying in Orléans in the 1620s. His stay in France was not without incident, as emerges from various letters and other documents of 1626-27.⁴⁴RAU, PA 26, Des Tombe archive, nos. 687, 712, 713. The young Van Ceters got into financial difficulties, and was eventually imprisoned in Orléans. He must have returned to Middelburg shortly after his release in 1627, and on 7 September of that year he signed an acknowledgement of a debt to his brother-in-law Johan van der Stringen, who had paid off his creditors. Van Ceters died two years later aged 27.

The portrait shows him standing, with a small book in his right hand and a glove in his left hand. This three-quarter length, which is dated 1622, is one of the weakest of the family portraits in the De Witte van Citters Bequest. The figure gives a flat and lifeless impression, the pose is wooden, and the sitter’s right arm is in an impossible position. There is a great contrast between the execution of this work and that of the portrait of Johan van Ceters’s younger sister Mertijntje (SK-A-2076), which dates from the following year. R.E.O. Ekkart has rightly remarked that the present work may be a posthumous portrait painted after a prototype from 1622.⁵⁵Oral communication, 2003. The clothing must have been modified in the process, for the lace collar is of a type that only became fashionable in the 1630s.⁶⁶Oral communication, Patricia Wardle, 2004; compare Rembrandt’s Portrait of Maarten Soolmans of 1634, illustrated in Bruyn et al. 1986, p. 548.

In 2003, scientific examination revealed that this portrait was painted over another one. This was confirmed by X-radiographs, in which the first sitter’s ruff and cuffs showed up clearly. It is not clear whether the underlying portrait is of a woman or a man. On the evidence of details of the clothing such as the ruff, the hidden portrait was painted in the second or third decade of the 17th century. The male portrait on top of it is probably of a much later date, and would have been commissioned by a descendant to fill a gap in the family series. The historically inaccurate collar lends weight to this theory, all the more so in that the supple, falling collar was painted as if it was of the standing type, as Patricia Wardle has pointed out.⁷⁷Oral communication, 2004. The painter’s identity is unknown.

A copy of this portrait by Willem Stad (1873-1959) is in Middelburg.⁸⁸Middelburg, Koninklijk Zeeuws Genootschap der Wetenschappen, inv. no. G. 1542.

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. 445.

1903, p. 20, no. 208; 1976, p. 658, no. A 2075 (as c. 1622); 2007, no. 445

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'anonymous, Portrait of Johan van Ceters (1602-29), after c. 1650', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: https://data.rijksmuseum.nl/20025900