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Lot Essay
By the time he painted this image of a soberly dressed member of the Wttenbogaert family in 1643, Flinck had been practicing portraiture for the better part of eight years, establishing himself as one of its leading practitioners in Amsterdam. It was, however, only in the years immediately after 1640 that Flinck fully found his feet as a portraitist, winning important commissions from Amsterdam’s elite, including a pair of commissions for group portraits for the Arquebusiers’ headquarters, the first of which he completed the year before this painting with the second following a couple of years later. His rapid ascendance was no doubt due in part to the fact that Rembrandt, with whom Flinck had worked in the 1630s and from whom he took over the Uylenburgh workshop, appears to have taken comparatively little interest in portraiture in the 1640s.
Though Flinck’s portraits of the 1640s display him increasingly turning away from the works of his master in favor of an elegant, fashionable esthetic inspired by Flemish prototypes, here Rembrandt’s influence remains clearly evident. Particularly notable is the delicate modeling and positioning of the man’s proper right hand across his chest. The motif, a sign of avowal and the trust the viewer could place in the sitter, had been favored by Rembrandt in a number of portraits of the 1630s, including such masterpieces as his Portrait of Marten Looten of 1632 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the Reverend Johannes Elison of 1634 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and the Portrait of the minister Johannes Wttenbogaert of 1633 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Indeed, the present composition is so close to Rembrandt that an unsigned and undated variant in the Rijksmuseum was acquired in 1809 with an attribution to the artist (see Bikker 2006, p. 192).
The identification of the sitter as a member of the Wttenbogaert family goes back to at least the early nineteenth century, when the version in the Rijksmuseum was described in an 1809 collection catalogue as ‘Pieter van Uitenbogaard’. This was followed by the sitter being referred to as Pieter’s nephew, Joannes Wttenbogaert (1608-1680), in the 1876 collection catalogue, an idea followed by both J.W. von Moltke and Werner Sumowski (loc. cit.) that would have necessitated the sitter be only thirty-five years old at the time he sat for this portrait. While S.A.C. Dudok van Heel proposed the sitter was instead Joannes’ father, Augustijn Wttenbogaert (1577-1655; loc. cit.), more recently he has been identified by Jonathan Bikker and others as Augustijn’s younger brother, Pieter Wttenbogaert, a civic official in Utrecht (loc. cit.).
Comparison with the variant in Amsterdam shows several differences in detail, most notably the lack of trimming around the sitter’s lace collar and cuff. Slightly smaller in scale, the example in Amsterdam is also more tightly cropped along both the left and lower edges, resulting in the loss of portions of the chair’s arm support and finial. Unlike the present painting, that which is in Amsterdam is also neither signed nor dated. While von Moltke and Sumowski both regarded the present painting as a replica of the Amsterdam variant, in 1956 Bernard Houthakker instead described the Amsterdam variant as ‘une réplique’ of the present painting (loc. cit.).
Though Flinck’s portraits of the 1640s display him increasingly turning away from the works of his master in favor of an elegant, fashionable esthetic inspired by Flemish prototypes, here Rembrandt’s influence remains clearly evident. Particularly notable is the delicate modeling and positioning of the man’s proper right hand across his chest. The motif, a sign of avowal and the trust the viewer could place in the sitter, had been favored by Rembrandt in a number of portraits of the 1630s, including such masterpieces as his Portrait of Marten Looten of 1632 (Los Angeles County Museum of Art), the Reverend Johannes Elison of 1634 (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston) and the Portrait of the minister Johannes Wttenbogaert of 1633 (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). Indeed, the present composition is so close to Rembrandt that an unsigned and undated variant in the Rijksmuseum was acquired in 1809 with an attribution to the artist (see Bikker 2006, p. 192).
The identification of the sitter as a member of the Wttenbogaert family goes back to at least the early nineteenth century, when the version in the Rijksmuseum was described in an 1809 collection catalogue as ‘Pieter van Uitenbogaard’. This was followed by the sitter being referred to as Pieter’s nephew, Joannes Wttenbogaert (1608-1680), in the 1876 collection catalogue, an idea followed by both J.W. von Moltke and Werner Sumowski (loc. cit.) that would have necessitated the sitter be only thirty-five years old at the time he sat for this portrait. While S.A.C. Dudok van Heel proposed the sitter was instead Joannes’ father, Augustijn Wttenbogaert (1577-1655; loc. cit.), more recently he has been identified by Jonathan Bikker and others as Augustijn’s younger brother, Pieter Wttenbogaert, a civic official in Utrecht (loc. cit.).
Comparison with the variant in Amsterdam shows several differences in detail, most notably the lack of trimming around the sitter’s lace collar and cuff. Slightly smaller in scale, the example in Amsterdam is also more tightly cropped along both the left and lower edges, resulting in the loss of portions of the chair’s arm support and finial. Unlike the present painting, that which is in Amsterdam is also neither signed nor dated. While von Moltke and Sumowski both regarded the present painting as a replica of the Amsterdam variant, in 1956 Bernard Houthakker instead described the Amsterdam variant as ‘une réplique’ of the present painting (loc. cit.).