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Lot Essay
An exceptional work in Poelenburgh’s oeuvre, this small portable triptych was intended for private devotion and would have been something of a rarity in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, seldom commissioned by Roman Catholics in the predominantly Calvinist Dutch Republic. While the artist painted The Adoration on paper and glued it onto the panel, the remaining scenes are painted on directly. The frame, cut from a single piece of wood, was carved with symmetrical Renaissance ornamentation, deliberately using an archaic design. In December 1656, it was acquired by Willem Vincent van Wittenhorst from the artist after he had seen it in his workshop, suggesting that Poelenburgh painted such religious works not only on commission but also for the open market. Van Wittenhorst paid the large sum of 200 guilders and subsequently had both his and his wife's names and coat-of-arms added to the frame as if it had been made on commission. In van Wittenhorst’s inventory, he described the triptych and its procurement in detail: ‘Een Kerstnachtie met twee deurties in een gesneden palmhouten leystie, heel curieus en uitmuntende wel gescildert, is van zijn oude werck, heb daer voor betaelt in december aen Poelenburch selfs anno 1656 de somma van twee hondert g.’ (‘A Nativity with two doors [wings] in a carved boxwood frame, very finely and outstandingly painted, is an early work, for which I personally paid Poelenburch the sum of 200 g. in December of the year 1656’; Sluijter-Seijffert, op. cit., pp. 111-2). Indeed, as one of his most notable patrons, van Wittenhorst owned no less than 57 works by Poelenburgh and commissioned him to paint a series of 21 small family portraits between 1648 and 1651.