Dutch painter and architect, active in Utrecht, where he helped found the St Lucas guild in 1611. He is best known for his portraits, which are similar to those made by his teacher Miereveld, but less severe. His portraits of shepherds and blonde shepherdesses with a deep decolletage were popular during his lifetime. He designed the Catherine Gate (destroyed) and possibly the façade of the Meat Market in Utrecht.
The protagonist in this painting is a voluptuous young woman invitingly displaying her d�collet�. The objects on the table (gold jewellery, strings of pearls, a leather case with three gold rings set with precious stones, and a small open book identify the maiden as a personification of profane love, or the Profane Venus. The subject of the painting on the back wall and the text and image in the little book complete the composition. They allude to Eros, the longing for material wealth and sexual desire.
The phenomenon of the painter as architect was not current as in Antwerp and Brussels but not entirely unknown in the Northern Netherlands at the beginning of the seventeenth century. In the first decades of the century architecture in Holland was dominated by the works of Lieven de Key in Haarlem and Hendrick de Keyser in Amsterdam, who both held civic functions as master stone-masons. In Utrecht, where this function was abolished in 1601, there was no genuine artistic designer in the municipal building department. When a new city gate was needed in 1621, the painter Paulus Moreelse, who was himself a member of the Council, was asked to make a design and supervise its construction. Moreelse had been in Rome before 1615, and his design for the St Catherine’s Gate is clearly of Italian inspiration.
The sitter is probably Bernardine van Bongaerdt (date of birth unknown), who in 1616 married Adolf Wenemar van Raesveldt. Her husband died in 1627, so she is here depicted as a widow. She lived until 1652.
This portrait, formerly attributed to Paulus Moreelse, is now thought to be a workshop production in the style of Moreelse.
Moreelse practised his master’s (Michiel van Miereveld) portrait style in Utrecht with equal dexterity, less severity, and greater versatility. He helped initiate the vogue for pastoral genre pictures and arcadian portraits.
His historiated portrait of Countess Sophia Hedwig shows her with her three sons in the role of Charity. Her bare breast and the accompanying children are traditional attributes of Charity, the virtue she is personifying. She is depicted wearing a quasioriental costume and jewelled headdress, her two eldest sons wear antique tunics, and her lightly draped youngest son wears the two strings of pearls which he was adorned when Morelsee portrayed him when he was twenty-nine weeks old. In the background there is a muse holding a baby thought to be Sophia’s daughter born November 1620.
In this painting Moreelse combined a pastoral idyll with a mythological scene, since this story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses is also a glorification of the unspoilt rural life.
