17 September 2000 - 19 February 2001

Exhibition Brochure | Brochure Images | Exhibition Information

Devotional Portraits | Political Portraits: 1 | 2 | Intimate Image: England
Intimate Image: France | Dutch Contribution

Intimate Images: The Dutch Contribution
Although the English technique of limning portrait miniatures grew directly out of the Netherlandish late medieval tradition of manuscript illumination, Dutch artists painting diminutive portraits preferred the fluid, translucent, yet precise qualities of oil paint on a copper support. In the sixteenth century, Dutch painters created intimately scaled devotional portraits; by the seventeenth century, however, demand increased for intimate portraits that could be held in the hand or displayed as a personal memento.

Cornelis van Poelenburgh's wonderful Jan Pellicorne as a Shepherd and its companion Susanna van Collen as a Shepherdess, probably executed at the time of the couple's betrothal in 1626, represent the distinctive approach to small portrait painting in the Dutch Republic. Dutch portraits, large or small, often represent members of the wealthy merchant class. That Poelenburgh started to portray this couple in the stiff white collars characteristic of the upper class has been revealed in x-radiographs. However, the finished pendants celebrate the romance of the couple's betrothal by showing them in the fanciful guise of a shepherd and shepherdess from the hills of mythic Arcadia. Jan's neat mustache, however, gives him away as a gentleman in playful disguise.

Small-scale portraits make up only a portion of the oeuvres of many important Dutch painters, from Poelenburgh and Jan de Bray, who created a number of delightful studies of children, to Gerard ter Borch and Gerard Dou. And though small, Dutch portraits are generally slightly larger than English and French portrait miniatures. Dutch artists were also renowned for their small-scale portrait prints. Some of these prints, such as Hendrik Goltzius' engravings of scholars or ministers, were formal in character and included laudatory texts. Other prints were extremely informal and personal, for instance, Rembrandt van Rijn's sensitive etchings of his wife Saskia.

The fascination that the small portrait held for some of the finest artists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was a direct response to one of the most intriguing developments arising from the Renaissance: the renewed value placed on the individual. Intimately related to this interest in humanism was an evolving concept of private space, which was accompanied by a growing taste for objects, including small-scale portraits, that made this space both personal and special. By the end of the seventeenth century, this particular mode of artistic expression had lost its vitality. It was only with the advent of photography in the mid-nineteenth century that the tradition of small portraiture took on new life and found fresh expressive possibilities.

Devotional Portraits | Political Portraits: 1 | 2 | Intimate Image: England
Intimate Image: France | Dutch Contribution

Acknowledgments
Written by Joaneath Spicer, The James A. Murnaghan Curator of Renaissance and Baroque Art, The Walters Art Gallery, in conjunction with Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., Curator of Northern Baroque Painting, National Gallery of Art. Photographs by Susan Tobin.