Portrait of Andries Rijckaert (1569-1639), three-quarter-length, holding a pair of gloves, a hat on a draped table to his left; and Portrait of Susanna Merchijs (1581-1633), three-quarter-length, holding a pair of gloves

This refined pair of portraits depicts Andries Rijckaert (1569-1639) and his second wife Susanna Merchijs (1581-1633). Born in Oudenaarde, Andries was a wealthy sugar refiner and spice merchant, documented in Amsterdam at the turn of the century. The Rijckaert family were undoubtedly significant members of the city’s flourishing mercantile class, who were commissioning portraiture at an unprecedented rate as a means of shaping and immortalising their personal and collective identity. The Rijckaerts were no different, and numerous generations of the family sat to the majority of the city’s foremost portrait painters over the decades. Andries and Susanna’s son David Rijckaert, born in 1614, is depicted in an elegant portrait of 1643 by Bartholomeus van der Helst (lot 35 in the Old Masters Evening Sale). Andries’ sister, Maria, married Daniel Bernard (1594-1681), whose first marriage produced a son of the same name who also sat to van der Helst in 1669 (Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen).

Andries’s elder brother, Johannes (1609-1679), would subsequently sit for a portrait by Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen in 1649 (lot 36 in the Old Masters Evening Sale), and Johannes’ own children would later appear in a pair of portraits dated 1666 by Isaac Luttichuys, (sold Christie’s, New York, 30 January 2014, lot 219).

We are grateful to Prof. Dr. Rudi Ekkart and Dr. Claire van den Donk for their extensive research on the portraits, in which they identify the influence of painter and collector Cornelis van der Voort, who had previously depicted other members of the Rijckaert family (sold Sotheby’s, Amsterdam, 13 November 2007, lot 49). The Antwerp-born van der Voort relocated with his family to Amsterdam as a young child, where he would grow to be one of the most significant figures in the city’s art scene, and whose work would shape the portrait tradition for years to come. Van der Voort built on the efforts of both his predecessors and his contemporaries; his three-quarter and half-length works show the influence of Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt, with whom the present works have previously been associated. As they are dated four years after van der Voort’s death, they cannot be by the artist himself, but they testify to the powerful influence his work had on Amsterdam’s portraitists, which endured for decades after his demise. These portraits have descended from the sitters in the Roëll and de Geer families and are appearing on the market for the first time since their commission.