Portrait of Margarita Cassier

The support is a thin oak panel consisting of three vertically grained planks and is bevelled on all sides. The brushmarks of the yellow ground are visible through the paint layer. Some underdrawing is visible in the mouth, the eyes and the fingernails. The paint was applied opaquely with visible brushstrokes. The pleats in the sitter’s skirt were painted on top of the pattern of the cloth.

Fair. Large areas in the background have been overpainted. There are retouchings and fillings along the panel joins, and there are losses in the paint film to the right of centre. There is a vertical 80 cm crack in the panel from the bottom right. The varnish is somewhat discoloured.

...; by descent through the families Courten, Boudaen Courten, Van Citters, De Witte van Citters; bequeathed to the museum by Jonkheer Jacob de Witte van Citters (1817-76), The Hague, 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, 1903

ObjectNumber: SK-A-905

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

Like the other portraits from the bequest of Jonkheer Jacob de Witte van Citters, this painting is numbered on the back and has a coat of arms, below which is an inscription identifying this particular sitter as Margarita Cassier.¹¹The coat of arms on the back of the panel is not listed as such in the CBG database. It is probably a composite of the arms of the Courten family (quarters 1 and 4) and of the Cassier or Casier family (quarters 2 and 3), but with different colours. It is recorded that she was the daughter of Jacob Cassier, but her dates of birth and death are not known. In June 1563 she married Guillaume Courten of Meenen, near Kortrijk in the southern Netherlands.²²For a 1575 portrait of Guillaume Courten, see SK-A-904; coll. cat. 1976, p. 690, as Southern Netherlands School 1575. Tradition has it that in 1567 Cassier and her maidservant Jannetje van Goorle freed her husband from prison, to which he had been sent by the Duke of Alva. Courten commissioned four tazzas with inscriptions to commemorate his escape, one of which is now in the Rijksmuseum.³³Coll. cat. Amsterdam 1952, p. 19, no. 45. Courten fled to England that same year, and was followed by his wife and their three-year-old daughter Margarita.⁴⁴See the entry on SK-A-2073. Cassier bore more children in England, among them William and Pieter.⁵⁵See the entry on SK-A-2074. Her son Pieter Courten and her grandson Pieter Boudaen Courten, the son of her daughter Margarita, later settled in Middelburg.⁶⁶See Wuestman 2005 for the Middelburg branch of the Courten family.

Margarita is shown standing, three-quarter length, with her left hand resting on the arm of the chair beside her. The painter of this rather stiff but skilfully executed portrait remains anonymous, but it can be assumed on stylistic grounds that he was Dutch. Domela Nieuwenhuis proposed an attribution to Abraham Vinck of Amsterdam, whose portraits do display compositional and stylistic affinities.⁷⁷Written communication, 2002; see, for example, Vinck’s Portrait of Mayken Martens-Baccher of 1612 in Utrecht, Centraal Museum; coll. cat. Utrecht 1999, II, p. 1480, no. 667 (ill.). However, Ekkart rightly queried this attribution on the grounds that Vinck worked for the local market in Amsterdam, whereas the Dutch branch of the Courten family lived in Middelburg.⁸⁸Written communication, 2003. On the evidence of the known biographical data it would therefore be more logical to look for the artist in the province of Zeeland.

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. 416.

1886, p. 98, no. 448k; 1887, p. 74, no. 599; 1903, p. 20, no. 206; 1934, p. 17, no. 206; 1976, p. 657, no. A 905; 2007, no. 416

G. Wuestman, 2007, 'anonymous, Portrait of Margarita Cassier, 1616', in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.4820