Portrait of Pier van Walta (b. circa 1580), three-quarter-length, holding a pair of gloves

This intriguing portrait has passed by inheritance for centuries, from its creation until 2025. The clarity of its history, however, is not matched by any certainty around its attribution, although its refined quality has prompted attributions to Wybrand de Geest, the leading portrait painter in Friesland during the first half of the seventeenth century. The late Dutch art historian and director of the Fries Museum, Dr. Abraham Wassenbergh (1924-2014), made significant contributions to the somewhat opaque field of Frisian portraiture in the mid-twentieth century, but questions around the hands working at that time remain; the subject has very recently returned to scholarly debate with the formation of the Stichting Het Friese Portret (the Frisian Portrait Foundation). Rudi Ekkart and Claire van den Donk-Schweigman, to whom we are grateful, have drawn similarities between the style of the present work and that of a group of eight Frisian portraits assembled by Wassenbergh under the provisional name 'Meester van de Driekwartfiguren', or the Master of the Three-Quarter-Length Figures (De portretkunst in Friesland in de zeventiende eeuw, Lochen, 1967, p. 41, pls. 109-111).

We are grateful to Emerald Dickson at Webaldic for confirming that the dexter coat-of-arms belongs to the noble van Walta family from Wiuwert, and the sinister coat to the Botnia family, representing the marriage of the sitter’s parents, Douwe van Walta and Luts Jarichs van Botnia. A portrait of the sitter’s daughter, Lucia van Walta (1609-1674), given to Wybrand de Geest in full and dated 1625, was formerly with the Weiss Gallery, London (fig. 1). The present painting passed by inheritance into the Cowper collection at Panshanger in Hertfordshire, and is first recorded there in 1885.