Lot Essay
The sitter was the daughter of Franciscus van der Wielen and Cornelia Bisschop and was born in Haarlem on 12 June 1650. She married Jonkheer Jan Adriaen de Kies van Wissen on 5 February 1668 in Haarlem.
The present portrait has only recently come to light; it has been identified, in a letter of 21 August 1992 from the Stichting Iconografisch Bureau, The Hague, as the pendant to the portrait of Jonkheer Jan Adriaen de Kies van Wissen, aged 29, in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (see illustration) (Inventaris Catalogus van de Oude Schilderkunst, 1984, p.34, inv.no. 2939, with ill.) which is signed and dated 1671 and bears a comparable inscription in white on the reverse.
Moltke (op.cit.) probably never saw the original; he included it as a doubtful attribution following Moes and Bode (annotations which also recorded Hofstede de Groot's acceptance of De Bray's authorship). That the present lot is indeed to be considered as authograph is established by comparison with the Portrait of a Lady, signed and dated 1674, recorded in the collection of Lord Burnham (Moltke, no. 156, fig. 15). The pendant portraits must have been separated before 1858, when the male portrait was sold by itself at the M.C. van Hall sale in Amsterdam, 27 April 1858, lot 131, as "J. van Sprong" (wrongly catalogued as on canvas)
See colour illustration
Copyright Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels
The present portrait has only recently come to light; it has been identified, in a letter of 21 August 1992 from the Stichting Iconografisch Bureau, The Hague, as the pendant to the portrait of Jonkheer Jan Adriaen de Kies van Wissen, aged 29, in the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels (see illustration) (Inventaris Catalogus van de Oude Schilderkunst, 1984, p.34, inv.no. 2939, with ill.) which is signed and dated 1671 and bears a comparable inscription in white on the reverse.
Moltke (op.cit.) probably never saw the original; he included it as a doubtful attribution following Moes and Bode (annotations which also recorded Hofstede de Groot's acceptance of De Bray's authorship). That the present lot is indeed to be considered as authograph is established by comparison with the Portrait of a Lady, signed and dated 1674, recorded in the collection of Lord Burnham (Moltke, no. 156, fig. 15). The pendant portraits must have been separated before 1858, when the male portrait was sold by itself at the M.C. van Hall sale in Amsterdam, 27 April 1858, lot 131, as "J. van Sprong" (wrongly catalogued as on canvas)
See colour illustration
Copyright Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts, Brussels