Portrait of Margaretha de Geer (1585-1672), Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp, 1651 – (Jacob Gerritszoon Cuyp) ◄ قبلی بعد ►

Artist: Jacob Gerritszoon Cuyp

تاریخ: 1651

اندازه: 74 x 60 cm

تکنیک: Oil On Panel

Born in Liège in 1583, Margaretha de Geer moved with her family to Aachen in 1595, and then to Dordrecht. In 1603, she married the Dordrecht merchant Jacob Trip (1575-1661), whose brother Elias was in business with her brother Louis. Together, the Trip and De Geer families made fortunes in, among other things, iron mining and the arms trade. Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp and Jacob Trip both served as elders in the Walloon Church in Dordrecht, and the artist painted pendant portraits of Trip and his wife for the first time in 1649.6 Like the 1649 Portrait of Margaretha de Geer, the Rijksmuseum painting from two years later shows the sitter at bust-length and without hands. This compositional type was the one most often employed by Cuyp.7 Margaretha’s dress, including the by then already old-fashioned millstone ruff, and the lighting are virtually identical in both paintings. However, the pose in the Rijksmuseum portrait differs somewhat from the one of 1649, as Margaretha’s face is shown more in profile. Cuyp may have made this slight alteration in Margaretha’s pose in order to create a greater sense of unity between this portrait and its pendant. The latter painting is undoubtedly the Portrait of Jacob Trip, now in a private collection in the United States (fig. a), which is also dated 1651 and was together with the Rijksmuseum Portrait of Margaretha de Geer until they were sold at auction in 1877. Significantly, the Portrait of Jacob Trip in a private collection differs from the 1649 Portrait of Jacob Trip in much the same way, that is the sitter in this portrait is oriented more towards his partner. In the 1651 Portrait of Jacob Trip, Cuyp achieved this effect by including the sitter’s hands. Another Portrait of Margaretha de Geer8 is also dated 1651, and was considered an autograph work by, among others, Hofstede de Groot, who once owned it, and Chong.9 Judging from photographs, this portrait appears to replicate the Rijksmuseum picture rather than vice versa. In addition to the six portraits by Jacob and Aelbert Cuyp of Margaretha de Geer and Jacob Trip, all executed within a very short space of time, there are at least eight portraits and replicas of these sitters dating between 1655 and 1669 by Nicolaes Maes,10 as well as a pendant pair and a portrait of Margaretha de Geer alone by Rembrandt.11 Hofstede de Groot surmised that the Dordrecht couple had so many portraits made of themselves as gifts for their children.12 The present painting, however, was probably not given to one of their children, but to Margaretha’s brother Louis de Geer as a 19th-century owner of the portrait, Egbert Lintelo de Geer (1822-87), was a descendant of Louis. 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. 54.