Portrait of a lady, three-quarter length, as Dido hunting

Ferdinand Bol was one of Rembrandt’s most celebrated students, apprenticing under the master between 1635 and 1641. Once he had established himself as an independent painter, Bol found success painting portraits and history pictures, of which the present Dido is an example. Rembrandt’s style would continue to influence the artist throughout his career.

At the time of its sale in 1785, this impressive depiction of Dido was accompanied by a pendant representing Aeneas, now at Kenwood House, London (fig. 1), clearly inspired by Rembrandt’s Portrait of a man with a hawk, currently in a private collection, signed and dated ‘Rembrandt 1643’. The subject of the present painting had at that time been misidentified as Diana, ‘Een Juffer ryk gekleed, zy in verbeeld in de gedaante van de Jagt- Godin Diana’ (‘A richly dressed lady, depicted in the form of the hunting goddess Diana’; loc. cit.). The pendant, meanwhile, was mistaken for a hunter, ‘Een Heer staande in een Landschap; hy is gekleed als een Jager […] en zoo konstig en kragtif geschilderd of het van Rembrandt was’ (‘A Gentleman Standing in a Landscape; he is dressed as a Hunter […] and painted as artfully and powerfully as if it were by Rembrandt.’; loc. cit.). The misreading of the two subjects was perpetuated in subsequent sales and publications until 1976, when Albert Blankert published the paintings in his dissertation, and again in his 1982 catalogue raisonné (loc. cit.). Blankert convincingly argued that Diana would never have been depicted in the company of a man and correctly identified the two figures instead as being Aeneas and Dido hunting.