GELDER, Aert de

Aert de Gelder, a pupil of Rembrandt, remained faithful to his master until the end of his life. De Gelder followed him not only in painting technique, but also in his attention to costumes and accessories. He built up a collection of robes, head coverings, armour and weapons, all of which he used in his biblical representations.

In this painting the artist depicted a rather unknown biblical story (I Samuel 21). David, poor and alone, was fleeing from King Saul. He took refuge with the priest Ahimelech, whom he asked for bread and a sword with which to defend himself. The priest gave David the sword of Goliath.

Aert de Gelder was one of Rembrandt’s last pupils and continued to work in the spirit and style of his master long after other pupils, for instance, Maes, Gerbrand van den Eeckhout and Jan Lievens, had succumbed to the fashionable trend towards smooth and perfunctory painting. He painted large compositions with two or three figures, mostly based on the Old Testament subjects so favoured by Rembrandt. Like his master, he loved rich properties and colourful draperies - the eighteenth-century historiographer Van Houbraken records that his studio was a veritable gallery of antiques, full of ancient weapons, silks and all kinds of utensils - and he used manikins for the sake of greater authenticity, carefully dressing them to suit the requirements of his theme. He painted with broad strokes of the brush, as Rembrandt had, and created warm tonalities and colour harmonies.

Esther and Mordecai, dating from 1685, is one of de Gelder’s most valuable and characteristic works. The Old Testament book of Esther is summarized here into a single dramatic moment, the internal tension being conveyed through the structure of the composition and through the gestures. The painting depicts the scene of the Biblical story when Mordecai, foster-father of Esther persuades the Queen to induce her husband to save the Jewish people.

De Gelder painted several versions of this subject differing in various degrees; the version now in the Providence Museum of Art, Rhode Island, also depicting half-length figures, is particularly close to the painting in Budapest.

This Old Testament scene, painted by Aert the Gelder in Rembrandt’s late style, perhaps represents the old Juda and his daughter-in-law Thamar. However, there are no details to confirm this assumption.

The portrait of G�rard de Lairesse, a fellow painter, was painted when he was 24 years old. The fashionably dressed man sits sin front of a table, holding some papers in his hand. There is nothing to indicate that this man is an artist. The painter made no attempt to flatter his model, he portrayed him with his outward imperfections.

Formerly the painting was attributed to Rembrandt.

The artist, a pupil of Rembrandt, is holding in his hands Rembrandt’s etching, “The 100 Guilder Print”. It is generally accepted as his self-portrait and as his homage to his teacher, but even if we ignore the fact that this portrait does not show a cross-eyed man - we are told that de Gelder bore his affliction with good humour - the evidence for this identification is flimsy.

In this unusual self-portrait the artist portrays himself laughing as he sits at his easel painting a portrait of an unlovely old lady. Why is he laughing? Albert Blankert persuasively argued that he has depicted himself as the ancient Greek painter Zeuxis who laughed so hard while painting the portrait of a funny old crone that he choked and died. The tale of Zeuxis’s demise is found in a Roman source dated about 200 AD and was repeated by both van Mander (1604) and Hoogstraten (1678). De Gelder’s Frankfurt painting was conceivably done in emulation of Rembrandt’s Self-Portrait at Cologne which shows the old master laughing. X-rays and technical investigation reveal that Rembrandt may also have portrayed himself as Zeuxis laughing as he painted a portrait of an ugly old woman.

The painter treats here a scene from the Book of Tobit, which is considered apocryphal by Protestant. While Rembrandt and other contemporary painters most often chose to represent the blindness of Tobit or his son Tobias guided by the archangel Raphael, De Gelder depicts the episode of the wedding of Sarah and Tobias. The scene shows the young couple in the house of Sarah’s parents, WEdna and Raguel. It is interesting to note that Tobias looks too young to wed.