Artist: Herman Henricksz. Van Vollenhoven
Date: 1612
Size: 88 x 111 cm
Technique: Oil On Canvas
Herman van Vollenhoven painted this self-portrait in Utrecht in 1612. He is looking out at the viewer while gesturing towards a couple with his right hand. In front of him is his easel with their as yet unfinished double portrait. The skull and hour-glass on the table allude to life’s brevity. Vanitas symbols of this kind are found in many 16th- and 17th-century self-portraits.4 It was a way for an artist to show that painting could enable his name to live on after his death. The couple in this picture, too, could only cheat death by having themselves immortalized in paint.5 Van Vollenhoven’s painting is very comparable to one of 1594 by Jacob Willemsz Delff, Self-Portrait of the Painter and his Family (SK-A-1460), and the portraits of himself and his wife that Joachim Wtewael painted in 1601.6 The theory that the couple in the present painting were related to the artist, and might even be his parents, is attractive but impossible to verify.7 One of the most striking similarities between this and one of Van Vollenhoven’s other few known works, The Supper at Emmaus, is the way in which the illusion of depth is reinforced by the curtains hanging on a rail in front of the main scene. It is possible that they were intended to be an allusion to a legend about the famous Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasius as recounted by Pliny. Parrhasius had painted some curtains that were so lifelike that his colleague wanted to pull them back to get a better view of the painting of which they were in fact part.8 Such a masterstroke of illusionism would also have been a great challenge for a 17th-century artist. Everhard Korthals Altes, 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. 318.
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