Portrait of Jacob de Witte (1628-79), Jan Mijtens, 1660 – (Johannes Mytens) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Johannes Mytens

Date: 1660

Size: 113 x 91 cm

Technique: Oil On Canvas

Six of the sixteen surviving pendant portraits by Jan Mijtens are in the collection of the Rijksmuseum. The earliest of these is the pair of Jacob de Witte, shown here, and his wife Jacoba van Orliens (SK-A-3022; also fig. a). Only the man’s picture bears the date 1660, but it can be taken as read that both were painted in the same year. The couple had married shortly before, on 15 October 1659.8 De Witte, who had studied law in Leiden, occupied various government posts, including councillor, burgomaster and treasurer of the town of Zierikzee, Chief Dike-Grave of the island of Schouwen and Steward-General of Zeeland Beoosten-Schelde (the northern part of the present-day province of Zeeland). The young Jacoba, who had just celebrated her 16th birthday at the time of their wedding, was born into a regent family of Middelburg. Jacob de Witte is depicted at three-quarter length against the backdrop of a majestic tree trunk, with a view into a distant landscape to the right. He is dressed in a fanciful costume consisting of a white shirt and a loose tunic with a dark silk robe draped around it. The strips of fabric hanging at the bottom of the light brown cloak allude to the pteruges of leather or metal worn by Roman generals below their cuirasses. Royalty and other rulers had delighted in wearing them in portraits as an allusion to their classical predecessors.9 In the 1660s the practice was also adopted by members of the elite.10 The fact that De Witte held no military rank will have been the reason for the cursory look of the accessory here. He is resting his right hand lightly on his hip and has laid the other one on the head of a greyhound. This reference to the chase extends into the landscape to the right of the tree, where a hunter and two dogs are running by. De Witte was not yet the owner of the manor of Haamstede and its castle when the picture was made. He only acquired them in 1678, a year before his death. Although it is not known which estate he did possess at the time of this painting, there must have been one, because hunting rights were reserved for those who enjoyed manorial rights. Jacoba van Orliens is shown with a large rock behind her, also with a vista in the background, here on the left. Like her husband she is wearing an unreal, fancy costume. Both companion pieces belong to the genre of fashionable courtly portraits with which Adriaen Hanneman and Pieter Nason also scored a great success with their clients in The Hague.11 Starting in the 1660s Mijtens painted many individual likenesses and pairs of this type, and the early one of Jacob de Witte, in particular, shows that he had already fully mastered it at the time.12 The sitters are usually extravagantly attired and are posed against a rock or large tree with a view through into an idealized Italianate landscape to one side. Both pictures were hung in Haamstede Castle when Jacob de Witte came into possession of it in 1678, and with the property they passed down through the Mogge and Muilman families until 1853, when the manor was sold by the last descendant, Anna-Maria Mogge Muilman. At the same time she bequeathed these pendants and other family portraits to Adriaan van der Hoop, who promised that he would exclude them from any sale of his collection.13 They went to his heirs after he died and were donated to the Rijksmuseum in 1924, together with three more paintings,14 but none of the other family portraits from Haamstede Castle given to Van der Hoop were among them. Richard Harmanni, 2023 See Key to abbreviations, Rijksmuseum painting catalogues and Acknowledgements