TROOST, Cornelis

This small-scale double portrait of Jeronimus Tonneman and his son Jeronimus Jr. ranks with the best conversation pieces. It is a type of portrait which continues the tradition of portraying full-length figures, seen in little, in a familiar setting while posing informally or engaged in activities that allude to their status and interests. The tradition was initiated by Thomas de Keyser in the 1620s and was carnied on by other artists in their small family portraits (Frans Hals, Molenaer, Adriaen van Ostade, Terborch, de Hooch, Metsu, Emmanuel de Witte). The tradition was broken in about 1675 by the new vogue for courtly portraits and those with a classical flavour. Troost can be credited with resuscitating it in the 1720s, and by the following decade he was its unrivalled master in Holland.

As in seventeenth-century Dutch portraits of this type, it is sometimes difficult to tell whether the interior which serves as a setting for a conversation piece is imaginary or not. For example, the room in which Tonneman is seated near his son playing a fashionable slender flute looks like a plausible portrait of an interior in his Amsterdam home. It is not. He did not have a room in his home decorated with a statue of St Susanna modelled after a work by the Flemish classical sculptor Fran�ois Duquesnoy (he and members of his workshop were responsible for the splendid sculptures that decorate Amsterdam’s new town hall) or large plaster reliefs of mythological and allegorical subjects.

On the other hand, the parchment-bound volume of van Mander’s Schilderboek that lies on the table doing double duty as a makeshift stand for the son’s music and as a sign that we are in the company of people who know something about the arts, is most likely not an imaginary prop. It almost certainly belonged to Tonneman; no less than three copies of van Mander’s volume were listed in a 1754 posthumous sale of his effects.

The signed and dated portrait of the unidentified gentleman wearing a grey satin waistcoat is an early work of the artist.

This painting is part of the NELRI series, Troost’s best known work. (The name is derived from the first letters of the Latin inscriptions which accompany the five views of the activities of a group of men during the night of a reunion.) In this series we are shown what happens during a gathering that begins quietly in the early evening and ends well after midnight with the participants dead drunk.

Troost is often called the Dutch Hogarth. They were exact contemporaries, both made formal portraits as well as conversation pieces, the name given to small-scale group portraits in a social setting. Both won fame for their series of genre pictures, which are commentaries on the life of their times, and for pictures of contemporary theatrical performances. Also both are satirists, but here there is a fundamental difference. Troost is never as critical or aggressive as Hogarth. Troost does not moralize. Instead of moralizing on the evils of drink, as Hogarth was wont to do, Troost’s NELRI pictures humorously show the stages as well as the psychological and physiological effects of inebriation. In this respect his spirit differs from Jan Steen’s too. It will be recalled that moralizing was a dominant strain in Steen’s art.