A Brill Calendar: April 13

Sitting for a Portrait...

Few Dutch painters are ‘cult-heroes’, if we use the phrase to include such mortals as Edison, Einstein, and Rodin, or Proust and Mozart.

The devotion, such heroes elicit is not limited to buffs of a particular cult hero’s specific ‘field’, but spills over to a supranational mass-audience, not devoted or even accustomed to study them in historical detail. The word ‘timeless’ may entail many meanings; a very elusive one, if used by those who live without some idea of the articulation of a historically documented past.

Together with Van Gogh and Vermeer, Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Leyden, 1606 – Amsterdam, 1669) is such a ‘cult-hero’; and ‘timelessness’ is often associated with many of their works by all kinds of aficionados. Yet, something rather special is generated by learning – quite by chance – that April 13 1633 was the only day that Johannes Wtenbogaert (Utrecht, February 11 1557 – The Hague, September 4 1644) posed for Rembrandt, then a young and fashionable master-painter. The resulting portrait, still in exquisite condition, is a superior work, a paragon of its genre in the Dutch School of painting during the ‘Golden Age’. When the Rijksmuseum added it to its collection late in the 20th century, the acquisition gained world-wide media attention.

Then the question arises whether our appreciation in its entirety is increased by knowing that this 76 year old minister and theologian, preacher to the Court of Maurits, Prince of Orange, had to live as an Arminian & Remonstrant in exile in Antwerp for many years before he could safely return to Holland - in 1626 - when Frederik Hendrik had succeeded his brother as Prince and Stadtholder? Or That Johannes had still some eleven years to live after today’s sitting? It is seldom that questions are easier to answer; obviously in the affirmative.