Portrait of Karel van der Hoeven

The support is a plain-weave canvas that has been lined; the tacking edges were cut off during this procedure. There is a light-coloured ground layer. The face of the sitter seems to be painted on top of a monochrome greyish layer, visible in the more transparent areas. It is not clear if this layer is local or covers the entire surface of the painting. Infrared photography revealed no underdrawing, but pentimenti in the jerkin, which was initially shorter. In addition, it seems that the right side of the collar was originally intended to have been narrower. Furthermore, the sitter’s right thumb is painted on top of the clothing; initially it was painted more to the left. The painting is smoothly executed, with impasto for the highlights.

Fair. There are several stable folds at the top, discoloured areas of retouching, and a discoloured varnish with its own craquelure pattern.

...; ? estate inventory, Frisian Stadholder’s Court, Leeuwarden, 16 August 1633, large blue room (‘Veertien stuck schildereien van capiteinen’), and the room next to the large room (‘Seeventien schildereien van capiteinen en ritmeisters.’);¹¹Drossaers/Lunsingh Scheurleer II, 1974, p. 53. inventory of paintings, Frisian Stadholder’s Court, Leeuwarden, c. 1800, Garde du Corps Hall (‘14. Capt van der Hoef ’);²²Tresoar, Leeuwarden, Familiearchief Van Eysinga-Vegelin van Claerbergen, inv. no. 536; Mulder-Radetzky 1997, pp. 197, 203....; Mauritshuis, The Hague, 1876; transferred to the museum, 1885; on loan to the Nederlands Legermuseum, Delft, 1953-2000

ObjectNumber: SK-A-877

The inscription ‘CAP,N VANDER,HOEF’ at top left identifies the sitter as Captain Karel van der Hoeven, who was a sergeant-major in the Utrecht regiment in 1602 and 1604.³³Ten Raa/De Bas 1911-, II, 1913, pp. 156, 279. The inscription ‘CAP,N’ indicates that he was later promoted to captain.

Originally, this portrait probably adorned the Stadholder’s Court in Leeuwarden along with four other officers’ portraits in the Rijksmuseum, those of Otto Brahe (SK-A-876), Eberhardt Hanekrodt (SK-A-875), Bartholomeus Andrio Walsdorffer (SK-A-1230) and Ripperda (SK-A-576). The earliest mention of such a series in the Court in Leeuwarden is found in an inventory of 1633, which mentions ‘fourteen paintings of captains’ and ‘seventeen paintings of captains and cavalry captains’.⁴⁴See Provenance. Mulder-Radetzky discovered a list made around 1800 in which 26 officers’ portraits in the Garde du Corps Hall of the Court are mentioned by name, enabling the five in the Rijksmuseum to be identified for the first time as having hung in the Stadholder’s Court.⁵⁵Mulder-Radetzky 1997, pp. 197, 203. The present one is listed as number 14, ‘Capt van der Hoef ’.⁶⁶See Provenance. It emerges from the list that the paintings hung there until the court moved out at the end of the 18th century. Mulder-Radetzky assumed that all the portraits in the list formed a single series of staff officers of the Frisian regiment commanded by Count Willem Lodewijk of Nassau, who was in residence in the Court from 1587 to 1620.⁷⁷Mulder-Radetzky 1997, p. 197. It is true that two of the officers portrayed, Walsdorffer (SK-A-1230) and Brahe (SK-A-876), commanded three companies in the pay of Friesland in 1609, along with Willem Lodewijk,⁸⁸Ten Raa/De Bas III, 1915, pp. 290-91. but here was no such connection with Willem Lodewijk in the cases of Hanekrodt (SK-A-875) or Van der Hoeven. It is unlikely, then, that the portraits originally belonged to the same series. In addition, the five in the Rijksmuseum do not have matching dimensions, and they also differ from each other slightly in composition and execution. Since Hanekrodt served under Ernst Casimir, it is not inconceivable that some of the portraits entered the Stadholder’s Court with the latter when he took up residence there in 1620. The inscriptions are certainly old, but were probably added later, when the different portraits or series of portraits were merged, with the identities of the sitters being recorded for future generations.

At present it is impossible to provide an attribution for this portrait. The type of collar makes it likely the painting was executed between 1605 and 1615.⁹⁹Note IB.

Yvette Bruijnen, 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. 406.

Mulder-Radetzky 1997, pp. 197, 203

1903, p. 19, no. 194; 1976, p. 656, no. A 877; 2007, no. 406

Y. Bruijnen, 2007, 'anonymous, Portrait of Karel van der Hoeven, c. 1605 - c. 1615', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.7041