VERSPRONCK, Jan Cornelisz

With great bravura, this fashionably clad member of the Haarlem civic guard stands with one arm akimbo, staring out at the viewer. His proud bearing, accented by the panache of his shimmering pink satin costume and plumed hat, attests to the great sense of confidence felt by the Dutch at the height of their “golden age.”

Verspronck was more than twenty years younger than Frans Hals and may have worked in his studio. He was certainly powerfully influenced by Hals’s bold, linear style and his assertive poses. However, Verspronck’s technique is less sketchy, his heads more elaborately worked up: he works in a more refined and detailed manner.

This subtle and charming portrait of a young girl holding an ostrich-feather fan is one of Verspronck’s most outstanding works. The delicately modelled face and the careful detailing of the dress and jewels set it apart from the work of Hals and give it a quite individual and striking effect.

The companion piece represents Willemina van Braeckel, the wife of the sitter.

Anthonie Charles, captain at sea and from 1640-41 envoy in Morocco, and Willemina were married in 1627 in Amsterdam. At the time they lived in Haarlem and had their portraits made by the second famous portrait painter, Verspronck.

This painting portrays Cornelis Montigny de Glarges, aged 43, half-length, in a brown coat and white lace ruff. He came from a wealthy Dutch family, and was educated at the University of Leiden. He was clearly very well connected in Haarlem and Leiden: he maintained an album amicorum from 1622 until 1679 in which friends including the still-life painter Floris van Dyck, and the draughtsman and engraver Jacob Matham, the portraitist David Bailly, as well as poets, historians, scientists and philosophers such as Jacob Cats, Samuel Ampzing, Theodor Schrevelius, Constantijn and Christiaan Huygens and Ren� Descartes inscribed poems, drawings and messages of goodwill.

Several of these friends of Montigny de Glarges also sat to Frans Hals, but while the pose of the present sitter reminds us of Hals, it is actually more extreme than in any of Hals’ portraits, with the sitter’s shoulder cocked elbow pointing straight out at the viewer, while his face is almost full-frontal. Although Verspronck was certainly influenced by his older townsman, his technique is entirely different and much more restrained, and his lighting more complex and theatrical.

The companion piece represents Anthonie Charles de Liedekercke, the husband of the sitter.

Anthonie Charles, captain at sea and from 1640-41 envoy in Morocco, and Willemina were married in 1627 in Amsterdam. At the time they lived in Haarlem and had their portraits made by the second famous portrait painter, Verspronck.

The painting is both signed and dated “J.V. Spronk 1640”.

Verspronck’s career in the years immediately after 1640 is distinguished by the abundance of his production and the maturity of his style. This female portrait is similar to other slightly earlier works from 1636-37. In his use of light and gradation of background tones from left to right, combined with the novel and distinctly lateral placement of the figure, the artist throws the contours of the sitter’s black dress into high relief against a luminous background. This technique is typical of Verspronck’s female portraits, and along with the torsion of the figure’s bust the contrast serves to enhance the plasticity of the dark mass of the clothing. In the pose and use of contrasting light a direct connection can be made with similar portrait in a private Dutch collection, as well as with a series of female portraits (1640-45) that Verspronck carried out as parts of paired “couples”. (The companion-piece of the painting, the Portrait of a Husband is also in the Rome museum.) After this period Verspronck changed his approach to composition and treatment of light, above all abandoning the method of contrasting dark clothing with an illuminated ground.

The sitters in such formal portraits as these are generally dressed in the most elaborate and modish version of contemporary costume. Comparing their clothes to the changes in fashion allows us to establish an approximate date for such pictures, though in many cases (such as this pair) the works are actually signed and dated by the artist.

The present canvas recalls various portraits by Versponck from the mid 1640s, both in handling, pose, and dress. In its rich and varied use of black hues. this elegant portrait owes much to Frans Hals, with whom Verspronck dominated the portrait market in Haarlem for the vast majority of his career.

This portrait of an unknown man follows a pattern used in several other half-length portraits by Verspronck in the 1640s.

Of the numerous individual likenesses of worthy sitters, most were intended to be seen with a “pendant,” another portrait that represented the person’s spouse. Pendants of married couples were the bread and butter of portrait painters such as Verspronck. This pair of well-executed portraits of an unidentified couple is characteristic of the voluminous genre, which did not change significantly over the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, except at the hands of innovative portraitists such as Rembrandt.

Even such apparently direct presentations rely on meaningful conventions. The paintings would have faced one another, perhaps on either side of a chimneypiece. Almost invariably, the woman’s portrait would hang at right, the man’s at left. From the perspective of the sitters, this convention placed the woman on the man’s “sinister” (left-hand) or lesser side, according to theological and social formulas which valued the “dexter” (right-hand) position more highly. This rule conformed to seventeenth-century Dutch views of marriage as a partnership based on mutual affection but steered by the man.

Verspronck was a son of the Haarlem painter Cornelis Engelsz (¹⁵⁷⁴⁄₇₅-1650) who probably trained him. His earliest existing portraits, done in the mid-thirties, show the strong influence of Frans Hals’s invention, but he never attempted to emulate Hals’s bold brushwork or temperament. His touch is restrained and his works are highly finished. Original was a penchant he soon developed for depicting sitters off centre leaving a wide, neutral background to the right or left of them; these areas are always exquisitely modulated from light to dark. This propensity is seen in his Portrait of a Woman of 1644 (a companion-piece representing the portrait of a man is also in The Hermitage); subsequently, he sets patrons much closer to the canvas’s edge. His palette rarely deviates from rich, shining blacks, subtle greys, browns, and white.

Like Hals, Verspronck was a particularly sensitive portraitist of women. His contemporaries in Haarlem apparently sensed this too. He was never commissioned to paint a regent group portrait but he was hired to execute two of regentesses. They are his most imposing paintings. The first group, dated 1641, depicts the Regentesses of the St Elizabeth Hospital. It was painted as a companion piece to Hals’s group portrait of the regents of the same institution executed in the same year, and, like Hals’s, it was done for the hospital and still belongs to it. The two paintings vie for the distinction of being the first regent group portraits painted in Haarlem.