Artist: Gerard Van Honthorst (Gerrit Van Honthorst)
Date: 1644
Size: 75 x 60 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
The armoured sitter wearing a lace collar in this portrait has been traditionally identified as Prince Willem II of Orange. Comparison with secure portraits of the prince (SK-A-871, for example), however, makes clear that the likeness is not his. As Moes and Van Biema argued, this painting might have belonged to a series that also included the Portrait of Amalia van Solms (SK-A-573) and the Portrait of Louise Christina of Solms-Braunfels by Honthorst’s studio in the Rijksmuseum (SK-A-574).9 Those portraits have similar dimensions, are painted on panel, and show the sitters at bust-length in painted ovals. As Honthorst and his assistants often showed their sitters, especially their noble ones, at bust-length and in painted ovals, and the format of the three Rijksmuseum portraits under discussion here (approximately 74 x 60 cm) seems to have been a standard one for Honthorst’s portraits, these factors are not enough to argue that the paintings belonged to a series. More telling is the fact that the present portrait, the Portrait of Amalia van Solms and the Portrait of Louise Christina of Solms-Braunfels all have painted white numbers on the reverse (‘12’, ‘17’, and ‘18’ respectively), and entered the collection very early on. Moes and Van Biema, however, confused matters by claiming elsewhere in their book that the present painting came, together with entirely different works, from the Admiralty on the Maas in Rotterdam as a Portrait of Willem II.10 Moes and Van Biema further reasoned that, if the present painting belonged to a series with the portraits of Amalia van Solms and Louise Christina of Solms-Braunfels, the sitter was likely the latter’s husband, Johan Wolfert van Brederode (1599-1655). However, an engraving by Cornelis Visscher and Pieter Soutman after a now lost portrait by Honthorst showing Van Brederode11 demonstrates that he too cannot be the sitter in the present painting. Jonathan Bikker, 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. 137.
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