Portrait of a Haarlem Citizen, Jan van Scorel, 1529 – (Jan Van Scorel) ◄ prijašnji Sljedeći ►

Umjetnik: Jan Van Scorel

Datum: 1529

Veličina: 49 x 35 cm

Tehnika: Oil On Panel

The sitter is shown bust-length, strongly silhouetted against a reddish-brown background. He wears a black tabbaard gown with a brown fur lining that is also visible at the ends of the sleeves. Near the panel’s bottom edge, he rests his proper right hand on one side of the robe’s wide black collar. He looks out to the viewer, with his black baret shading the upper part of his forehead. The portrait is still in its original frame, which in this case was grounded and painted separately. Once the panel was painted, it was placed in the frame against a rebate. This frame type appears after c. 1520 in the Netherlands, and it is not unusual for the upper curved portion to be a separate piece.9 Except for the mouldings, this frame is identical in construction to another original: the frame around the portrait of Agatha van Schoonhoven, Scorel’s life-long companion, which Scorel signed and dated the same year, 1529.10 On the bottom transverse of the Rijksmuseum frame there is a fictive sheet of paper or parchment attached to the wood with a fictive red wax seal, a device Scorel used in other portraits. Similar cartellinos with inscriptions appear under Scorel’s portraits of Jerusalem pilgrims in Utrecht and Haarlem, although they occur on the panel itself, not the frame, and are painted much more thinly.11 The sheet here is painted with a heavy impasto. Since the date 1529 appears on the frame, the portrait must have been executed during Scorel’s Haarlem period, 1527-30. Although it is known that he provided works for the order of St John in that city, it is unlikely that the sitter is a member of that order since there is no white Maltese cross on his robe.12 Likewise, Hoogewerff’s suggestion that the sitter is Simon van Sanen, commander of the order of St John in Haarlem, has found no support.13 According to several authors, in 1529 Simon van Sanen would have been older than 46, the age of the sitter given in the inscription.14 To Bruyn, the costume is more indicative of a scholar or cleric than a member of the nobility.15 Perhaps the painting’s provenance will eventually help in identifying the person portrayed here. The painting shows all the characteristics of Scorel’s portraiture. It has an abstract character, deriving from Scorel’s planar conception of volumes and rendering of surfaces. A strong pattern develops in the folds of the dark garment, and in the silhouetted shapes of the sitter’s shoulders and hat. The modelling in the face reveals Scorel’s typical approach: impasto highlights and thin glazes bringing out the geometric structure of the head.16 As often typifies Scorel’s works, the painter made subtle changes during the course of execution. Both infrared reflectography and X-rays show that the baret has been made smaller on the left and larger on the right, making the two sides more symmetrical. Interestingly, the mouth was changed from a smiling shape in the underdrawing to a straight line (fig. a). The sitter’s more serious final expression is enhanced by the knit brow, reminiscent of the frown in Scorel’s Portrait of a Man in Berlin, which was also done during the artist’s Haarlem period.17 There are zigzags in the underdrawing of the cheek to localise the dark shadow. These compare with underdrawn shading in the jaw of Scorel’s Portrait of a Cleric in Princeton,18 where zigzags serve the same function. The Rijksmuseum portrait is distinguished by its somewhat cramped format, with the frame impinging on the baret, cutting off one shoulder, and emphasising the disproportionate relationship between the smaller shoulders and larger head. These features carry over from portraits Scorel executed previously in Utrecht, the Princeton portrait mentioned above and Scorel’s two group portraits of Twelve Members of the Utrecht Brotherhood of Jerusalem Pilgrims, c. 1525-27.19 M. Faries, 2010 Literature updated, 2016