BOR, Paulus

This painting and a similar painting in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Cydippe with Acontius’s Apple, were painted as a pair depicting complementary stories, as told in Ovid’s Heroides.

Paulus Bor is one of the most remarkable artists of the seventeenth century. He was a man of substantial means and was presumably not dependent on his income from painting. For this reason, perhaps, his pictures look like the work of an intellectual dilettante, not unlike those by his fellow townsman Jacob van Campen. Bor seldom signed or dated his pictures, and it is therefore difficult to attribute or date them. His extraordinary paintings, many of which are strange compositions rendered in an almost primitive technique, are all the more unusual because they are often of obscure and enigmatic subjects.

Bor’s early style was informed by the older generation of Utrecht painters, such as Abraham van Bloemaert and Jan van Bijlert, while in Rome he was exposed to Italian art and the works of his fellow members of the Schildersbent. From the 1630s onward we see the influence of the Haarlem painters Salomon de Bray, Pieter de Grebber and Jacob van Campen, but it was the last who had the greatest impact on Bor and there are a number of pictures that have at different times been given to both artists.

The picture shows a woman kneeling on a cushion, contemplating an apple she holds in her right hand. The scene is identified as an episode from Heroides by Ovid who wrote of the love of the prosperous but undistinguished Acontius for Cydippe, the daughter of a wealthy man. While Cydippe was offering a sacrifice in the temple, Acontius cast an apple at her feet, inscribed with the words: ‘I vow at the shrine of Diana that I shall wed Acontius’. Cydippe read her suitor’s message aloud and, having uttered the promise, was bound to become Acontius’s wife. Paulus Bor is the only painter known to have illustrated this tale. He must have been interested in classical literature and appears to have had a preference for relatively obscure episodes.

In spite of a number of classicising works, Ferdinand Bor is counted among the Utrecht Caravaggists. The powerful chiaroscuro present in Jesus among the Doctors is typical of Caravaggism, just as the undefined space in which the scene is staged. The unconventional interpretation of the iconography, the type of figures, the almost caricatural faces, and the smooth brushwork are features characterising Bor’s entire oeuvre.

In the present work a young naked woman is seated in a very spare interior, the most notable features of which are the expanse of greyish-brown wall and, in the left corner, a small stove. The inclusion of a nude - much less a full-length nude - in a genre scene is remarkable in the 1640s. While artists in the later 16th and early 17th centuries happily populated their classical and mythological scenes with nude women, this was not the case in representations of contemporary domestic life.

This is one of the few religious pictures by the artist. It reveals his Roman Catholic background, and shows him working in the Utrecht tradition of monumental religious painting established by Abraham Bloemaert, whose preference for robing his figures in lavish and colourful betassled and gold embroidered liturgical dress is reflected here in the thoroughly episcopal Angel of the Annunciation. This figure, and the equally almost monumental Virgin, kneeling in a dark blue dress, dominate the picture frame, allowing the artist to purge the composition of almost all extraneous detail.