Christ on the Way to Calvary

Scientific examination and reports

technical report: I. Verslype / Z. Benders, RMA, mei 2008

Conservation

conservator unknown, 1974: supposedly cleaned and restored

Provenance

? Commissioned as one of the high altarpieces of the hidden Jesuit church, Sint Franciscus Xaveriuskerk, or the Krijtberg, Amsterdam; sale, Margaret Louise van Alen Bruguiere et al. [section 'The Dutch Province of the Society of Jesus, removed from the Church of Saint Francis Xavier, Amsterdam'], London (Christie’s), 5 December 1969, no. 100, bought in;¹Copy RMA. Note RMA. sale, the Albright Leasing Corporation et al. [section 'The Dutch Province of the Society of Jesus'], London (Christie’s), 29 March 1974, no. 18, 46,000 gns, to the Leger Galleries;²Copy RMA. Leger Galleries, London, 1976;…; the dealer Colnaghi, New York, 1984; the dealer Robert Noortman, Maastricht; from whom, 1986, on loan to the museum; from whom, fl. 481,599, with support from the Rijksmuseum Stichting, to the museum, 1997; on loan to the Bonnefantenmuseum, Maastricht, since 2004

ObjectNumber: SK-A-4923

Credit line: Purchased with the support of the Rijksmuseum-Stichting

The artist

Biography

Jacques Jordaens (Antwerp 1593 - Antwerp 1678)

The long-lived, versatile and prolific figure painter Jacques Jordaens used as a Christian name the French form Jacques rather than Jacob, as has long been long credited. He made his career in his native city Antwerp. The son of a linen merchant and baptized in the Onze-Lieve-Vrouwekerk on 20 May 1593, he was apprenticed to Adam van Noort in 1607/08 and became a master in 1615/16. He married his master’s daughter, Catherina, in the latter year which also saw his earliest, extant dated work, The Adoration of the Shepherds (Metropolitan Museum of Art).

His first apprentice was registered in 1620/21; there were to be fourteen others (not including his son, who also became a painter), the last listed in 1666/67. This does not amount to the full complement of his assistants.

Much of his output consisted in conventional religious and mythological scenes, and to a lesser extent portraiture. Some of his paintings were highly original in content, not least for being executed on a large scale, as for instance his popular Satyr and the Peasant, The King Drinks and As the Old Sing so the Young Pipe.

Jordaens was much influenced by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) both in his colouring and vocabulary of forms. Indeed the two collaborated, and Jordaens was one of many Antwerp artists who worked on the decorations designed by Rubens for the Joyous Entry of the Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand into Antwerp in 1635; shortly thereafter he worked up Rubens’s designs for paintings destined for King Philip IV of Spain’s Torre de la Parada outside Madrid. Three paintings by Jordaens were listed in Rubens’s collection when he died in 1640.³J.M. Muller, Rubens: The Artist as Collector, Princeton 1989, p. 138.

Jordaens had by then won at least part of the commission awarded indirectly from King Charles I of Great Britain for a series of paintings to decorate the queen’s cabinet in the Queen’s House at Greenwich Palace, outside London. This was never completed. Jordaens had won the commission against vigorous lobbying on behalf of the declining Rubens, and after the latter’s death he was quickly recognized as the leading artist active in Antwerp.

At the end of the decade he was commissioned to take part in the decoration of the Oranjezaal in the Huis ten Bosch outside The Hague. The Triumph of Prince Frederik Hendrik, finished in 1652, was the largest in the cycle, measuring over seven metres in height and width. Some ten years later he contributed four works as part of the decoration of the large gallery in the Amsterdam Town Hall.

By this time Jordaens owned a substantial property in Antwerp on the Hoogstraat embellished by a fine, new baroque facade. A census of 1659 showed that he was one of 400 richest burghers of the city.

His only documented journeys outside the Spanish Netherlands were to the United Provinces; this for the first time in 1632 when accompanied by his wife and father-in-law, who was early described as a Protestant. Jordaens seems to have conformed as an ostensible Catholic until the first half of the 1650s, when he was fined for being responsible for heretical writings. His wife may always have been a secret Protestant; she was buried in 1659 in the cemetery of the Reformed community at Putte over the border in the United Provinces. Jordaens was also buried there having died in Antwerp on 18 October 1678; communion according to the Calvinist rite had been celebrated intermittently in his house for some four years.

Jordaens’s extant corpus of paintings and drawings is large. He also made designs for tapestries. Apart from his own self-portraits, his likeness by Anthony van Dyck (1599-1641) for his Iconography was engraved by Pieter de Jode I or II.⁴S. Turner and C. Depauw, The New Hollstein Dutch and Flemish Etchings, Engravings and Woodcuts, 1450-1700: Anthony van Dyck, 7 vols., Rotterdam 2002, II, 2002, no. 71.

REFERENCES
R.-A. d’Hulst et al., Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), I: Paintings and Tapestries, exh. cat. Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) 1993, pp. 7-21

Entry

Christ’s ascent to Calvary is briefly told in all four Gospels: Matthew 27:31-32; Mark 15:20-21; Luke 23:26, 28, 32; and John 19:16-17. Following a by then well-established tradition, Jacob Jordaens shows Christ beneath the cross, the base of which is held by Simon of Cyrene. The Saviour passes by St Veronica, who proffers the holy handkerchief or veil, as the Virgin weeps nearby.⁵L. Réau, Iconographie de l’art chrétien, 3 vols., Paris 1955-59, II (2), pp. 463ff.; Rubens’s composition engraved by Pontius, see below, has, as a legend, quotations from the Vulgate of John 19 and Luke 23.

The painting was offered for sale in 1969 by the Dutch Province of the Society of Jesus, as coming from the Sint-Franciscus Xaveriuskerk, otherwise known as the Krijtberg, in Amsterdam. The Krijtberg was in fact the name of the foremost of a row of three houses on the Singel which was bought for the Jesuits in 1650, and converted into a hidden church; it opened 1 January 1654.

The general assumption has been that Jordaens’s painting was commissioned to occupy the space above the high altar of this hidden church, although it was apparently first recorded there only in 1936 when it was published as the work of Jordaens.⁶E. Burg Berger, ‘An Unknown Work by Jacob Jordaens’, The Burlington Magazine 68 (1936), pp. 139-41. This provenance has now been questioned by Schillemans⁷G. van den Hout and R. Schillemans (eds.), Putti en cherubijntjes. Het religieuze werk van Jacob de Wit (1695-1754), Haarlem/Amsterdam 1995, p. 61. and Van Eck⁸X. van Eck, Clandestine Splendor: Paintings for the Catholic Church in the Dutch Republic, Zwolle 2008, pp. 124-25. on the grounds that it is smaller than the three other altarpieces of 1656 and 1657, all of the same size, which came from the Krijtberg,⁹These are: ‘P.N. Bosch’, The Vision of St Ignatius at Storta, signed and dated 1656 (present whereabouts unknown), M. Roethlisberger and M.-J. Bok, Abraham Bloemaert and his Sons: Paintings and Prints, 2 vols., Doornspijk 1993, I, p. 229, under 292; Erasmus Quellinus II, The Virgin and Child Appearing to St Francis Xavier, signed and dated 1656 (Indianapolis Museum of Arts), De Bruyn gives the date as 1676, see J.-P. de Bruyn, Erasmus II Quellinus, 1607-1678. De schilderijen met catalogue raisonné, Freren 1988, p. 280, no. 252; and Jan Cossier, Adoration of the Shepherds, signed and dated 1657 (Minneapolis Institute of Arts), Chronique des Arts 79 (1972), p. 83, no. 294. and which, following Jesuit practice, would have been rotated above the high altar in accordance with the liturgical year.¹⁰H. Vlieghe, ‘Rubens’s Activity for the Ghent Jesuits in 1633’, The Burlington Magazine 111 (1969), p. 428 and note 14; J.R. Martin, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, I: The Ceiling Paintings for the Jesuit Church in Antwerp, London/New York 1968, pp. 29-30; W.P. (Prohaska) in J. Kräftner et al. (eds.), Rubens in Vienna: The Masterpieces in the Collections of the Prince of Liechtenstein, the Kunsthistorisches Museum and the Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste in Vienna, exh. cat. Vienna 2004, p. 216 under nos. 46, 47.

The Rijksmuseum picture has generally been dated between 1655 and 1660 on stylistic grounds. In 1656 Father Thomas Dekens, Provincial of the Flemish-Belgian Province, listed four Jesuit missionaries in Amsterdam.¹¹‘Relatio Visitationis Reverendi Patris Thomae Dekens Provincialis Provinciae Flandro-Belgicae, Louvain, 8 December 1656’, Archief voor de Geschiedenis van het Aartsbisdom Utrecht. Bijdragen 3 (1876), pp. 50-51. Other sources allow us to identify the hidden churches at which three of them officiated: Peeter Laurensz (1588-1664) at the Krijtberg; Hendrik Alckemade van Nydenborch (1613-1680) at the Keyserskroon Zaaier and August van Teijlingen (d. 1669) at the Paapegaai. Before all of these were officially shut in 1708, the Paapegaai on the Kalverstraat was transferred to the regular clergy on Father Van Teijlingen’s death in 1669.¹²M. Spiertz, ‘Pratique pastorale dans la Mission hollandaise, Jésuites dans la République des Sept Provinces (1592-1773)’, in E. Put and M. Wynants (eds.), Les jésuites dans les Pays-Bas et la principauté de Liège (1542-1773), exh. cat. Brussels (Archives Générales du Royaume) 1991, pp. 87-99. Van Eck, presumably following Allard,¹³H.J. Allard, De St Franciscus Xaverius-kerk of de Krijtberg te Amsterdam. Een beknopte geschiedenis van de kerk en ’t kerkgebouw van dien naam, Maastricht 1883, p. 54. believed that the Jordaens was painted for the Zaaier and proposed that it was transferred from there to the Krijtberg when the Zaaier was wrested from the Jesuits in 1669.

In support of Van Eck’s hypothesis is the fact that, according to De Bruyn, the Krijtberg Quellinus came from the Zaaier¹⁴Erasmus Quellinus II, The Virgin and Child Appearing to St Francis Xavier, signed and dated 1656 (Indianapolis Museum of Arts); De Bruyn gives the date as 1676, in J.-P. de Bruyn, Erasmus II Quellinus, 1607-1678. De schilderijen met catalogue raisonné, Freren 1988, p. 280, no. 252. (having fortuitously had the correct measurements for its new home). But it has to be said that in our present state of knowledge there is no means of knowing if the early history of the Jordaens was similar. This might be the case, but of the four Jesuits discussed by Dekens only the building activity of Laurensz at the Krijtberg is mentioned – it was criticized for its extravagance. A discrepancy in size of 27 and 16 cm in height and width could have been made good by a framing element, and could be explained by – a remote possibility – human error.

Laurensz came from Mechelen and was one of the most prominent Jesuit fathers in the northern Netherlands. He had been active in Amsterdam since 1628, following three years spent at the Jesuit church in Breda.¹⁵P.C. Molhuysen et al. (eds.), Nieuw Nederlandsch biografisch woordenboek, 10 vols., Leiden 1911-37, II, cols. 789-90; S. Segal, Jan Davidsz. de Heem en zijn kring, exh. cat. Utrecht (Centraal Museum)/Braunschweig (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum) 1991, nos. 1, 75. Only one of the Krijtberg altarpieces can perhaps be associated with him. The Vision of St Ignatius at Storta, apparently signed and dated 1656 by the otherwise unknown P.N. Bosch, derives from Abraham Bloemaert’s lost altarpiece for the Jesuit College at ’s-Hertogenbosch,¹⁶‘P.N. Bosch’, The Vision of St Ignatius at Storta, signed and dated 1656 (present whereabouts unknown). See M. Roethlisberger and M.-J. Bok, Abraham Bloemaert and his Sons: Paintings and Prints, 2 vols., Doornspijk 1993, I, pp. 226-27, no. 292, and p. 229. which Laurensz might have known when he was at nearby Breda.

The commission to Jordaens could have come direct from Amsterdam or via the Jesuits in Antwerp. The Father Superior of the Dutch Jesuit mission in 1652 was Frans van der Meersch, followed in 1656 by Adriaan Cools. The Provincials at the Flemish-Belgian Province in the 1650s, all Antwerp born, were Joan Engelgrave, appointed 1652, Thomas Dekens from 1654, and Johan van Renterghem from 1657.¹⁷F. van Hoeck, Schets van de geschiedenis der Jezuïeten in Nederland, 8 vols., Nijmegen 1940, pp. 405, 407.

From Jordaens’s standpoint it can be said that while he worked extensively for Catholic religious orders, the Ascent to Calvary is seemingly his only known Jesuit commission. He had had contact with the United Provinces since at least his first documented visit there in 1632. By 1649 work on his most important Dutch commission – for the Oranjezaal in the Huis ten Bosch – was in contemplation. In 1661 he received a commission to execute a painting for the Amsterdam Town Hall.

The Rijksmuseum picture, of which there is a studio variant in reverse in Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam,¹⁸Oil on canvas, 259 x 210 cm; Catalogus schilderijen tot 1800, Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen) 1962, p. 79, no. 1379; illustrated in E. Hinterding and F. Horsch, ‘“A Small but Choice Collection”: The Art Gallery of King William II of the Netherlands (1792-1849)’, Simiolus 19 (1989), pp. 5-122, esp. no. 78, pp. 81-82. appears to be Jordaens’s only treatment of the subject. It was carefully planned with the components reserved and apparently only one pentiment (in the base of the yellow garment of the horseman) and one unexplained shape beneath Christ’s robe and the soldier’s arm. A drawing in the Pushkin Museum¹⁹R.A. d’Hulst, Jordaens Drawings, translated by P.S. Falla, 4 vols., London/New York 1974, II, no. A357. may be his earliest extant consideration of the composition. It concentrates on the suffering of Christ as the cross is pressed down on his stumbling body by a Roman soldier and a Jew. A second compositional drawing in the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge (Mass.),²⁰R.A. d’Hulst, Jordaens Drawings, translated by P.S. Falla, 4 vols., London/New York 1974, II, no. A356. shows Jordaens alleviating Christ’s suffering by introducing the figure of Simon of Cyrene. As D’Hulst has pointed out, the artist most likely had turned to Paul Pontius’s (1603-1658) print of 1632 after a design by Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640)²¹J.R. Judson, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, VI: The Passion of Christ, London 2000, no. 18, copy 11. to develop his ideas further: the pose of Simon and the introduction of St Veronica, the Virgin, and St John result probably from Jordaens’s study of it. He continued to modify the design before executing the painting chiefly by abandoning the two tormenters shown pressing down the cross and replacing them with one of the thieves and an executioner carrying tools. For the second thief – difficult to identify, if not altogether absent in the Fogg Art Museum sheet – he turned, as D’Hulst pointed out, to Rubens’s altarpiece for the Sint-Pieter en Pauluskerk in the Benedictine monastery of Afflighem, installed in 1637 (see SK-A-344).²²J.R. Judson, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, VI: The Passion of Christ, London 2000, no. 19. The thief in the foreground being marched forward by the soldier in armour is evidently inspired, though in reverse, by the group in the left foreground in that altarpiece. Jordaens must have seen it, or drawings for, or related to, it (in two of which – albeit recently doubted as autograph – the thieves are being marched to the right).²³J.R. Judson, Corpus Rubenianum Ludwig Burchard, VI: The Passion of Christ, London 2000, under no. 17 (where D’Hulst’s view, relayed by Judson, is here followed) and no. 19b; J. Vander Auwera et al., Rubens: A Genius at Work, exh. cat. Brussels (Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België) 2007-08, nos. 73, 74.

The placement of the three horsemen was not inspired by Rubens; Jordaens may have developed the motif from Dürer’s two prints of the Way to Calvary, one of which also includes an executioner carrying a ladder with his head between the rungs in similar subsidiary role in the procession.²⁴W.L. Strauss (ed.), The Illustrated Bartsch, New York 1978-, X, no. 10 (p. 117), The Bearing the Cross (The Large Passion), for the executioner with the ladder, for the bearded horseman and the jowly rabbi similarly juxtaposed; no. 37 (p. 120), The Bearing the Cross (The Small Passion), also gives greater prominence to the executioner with the ladder. The idea, also found in earlier works other than Dürer’s, was adapted by Otto van Veen (1556-1624) in his picture in Brussels.²⁵H. Pauwels (ed.), Catalogue inventaire de la peinture ancienne, Brussels (Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België) 1984, p. 303, no. 238.

Two head studies by Jordaens of an old man²⁶Pieter Brueghel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art)/Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen) 2001, no. 44. and a young woman in three-quarter profile²⁷Pieter Brueghel the Elder: Drawings and Prints, exh. cat. New York (Metropolitan Museum of Art)/Rotterdam (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen) 2001, no. 43. have also been associated by D’Hulst²⁸R.A. d’Hulst, Jordaens Drawings, translated by P.S. Falla, 4 vols., London/New York 1974, II, nos. A358, A359. with preparation for the altarpiece. De Haan believes that the drawing for the young woman need not have been specifically for this St Veronica, whose hair is decorated in the painting, but should be connected with the shepherdess in the Adoration of the Shepherds at Frankfurt of 1653,²⁹J. Sander and B. Brinkman, Niederländische Gemälde vor 1800 im Städel/Netherlandish Painting before 1800 at the Städel, Franfurt am Main (Städtische Galerie und Städelsches Kunstinstitut) 1995-98, p. 39 and pl. 78. and that the study for the old man could have served equally well for the shepherd at the left of the Lyons Adoration of the Shepherds³⁰H. Buijs and M. van Berge-Gerbaud, Tableaux flamands et hollandais du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Collections flamands et hollandaises des Musées de Province, Paris/Lyon 1991, no. 27, where dated c. 1644 or in the 1650s. as for Simon of Cyrene. It has to be said that in none of the cases (nor in others she cites) is either drawing exactly replicated; they could rather have served as Jordaens’s starting points and for reference.

The horseman to the right wears what Jordaens took for a rabbi’s headdress as depicted for instance in the Christ Among the Doctors³¹R.A. d’Hulst, Jacob Jordaens, translated by P.S. Falla, New York 1982, no. 229, illustrated p. 259. of 1663 at Mainz. His jowly features are also deployed as a characteristic of one of the doctors there. The physiognomy of Christ is like that in The Vision of St Bruno,³²R.A. d’Hulst, Jacob Jordaens, translated by P.S. Falla, New York 1982, no. 225, illustrated p. 256. formerly in the Bode-Museum, Berlin, and in the Copenhagen Christ Blessing the Little Children,³³R.A. d’Hulst, Jacob Jordaens, translated by P.S. Falla, New York 1982, no. 214, illustrated p. 245; O. Koester, Flemish Paintings, 1600-1800, Copenhagen (Statens Museum for Kunst) 2000, no. KM 5sp 234, pp. 174-76. where the mother, seen in profile with her hand raised, also recalls the Virgin in the Ascent to Calvary.

The Rijksmuseum picture – as an altarpiece – was meant to be seen from a distance, and this might explain the rather hard silhouettes of the horsemen and their horses. Some studio participation here and in the rising hill towards Golgotha is quite possible; otherwise the altarpiece can be considered autograph, even allowing for the less than happy appearance of Christ’s robe probably due to its subsequent, unrecorded mistreatment.

Gregory Martin, 2022

Literature

R.-A. d’Hulst et al., Jacob Jordaens (1593-1678), I: Paintings and Tapestries, exh. cat Antwerp (Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten) 1993, no. A91

Collection catalogues

1992, p. 60, no. C 1614

Citation

G. Martin, 2022, 'Jacques Jordaens, Christ on the Way to Calvary, c. 1655 - c. 1660', in Flemish Paintings in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.8855

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