Elderly ManLeiden School(Leiden 1613 – 1675 Leiden)

ca. 1630
oil on panel
50.9 x 40.6 cm
GD-109© 2020 The Leiden Collection

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How to cite
Rahusen, Henriette. “Elderly Man” (2017). In The Leiden Collection Catalogue, 2nd ed. Edited by Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr. New York, 2017–20. https://theleidencollection.com/artwork/an-elderly-man/ (archived May2020).
A PDF of every version of this entry is available in this Online Catalogue's Archive, and the Archive ismanaged by a permanent URL. New versions are added only when a substantive change to the narrativeoccurs.

© 2020 The Leiden Collection

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Seen in profile, the elderly man seems lost in thought as he gazes quietly

Comparative Figures

downward in a pose echoing the sloped shape of his left shoulder. Intenselight reflecting off the sitter’s bald head helps draw attention to his finely
rendered and precisely articulated features. No attributes identify the sitter,
who wears a softly-rendered reddish-brown woolen cloak that covers asimple white shirt visible at the neck. The painting is, in fact, a characterstudy, or tronie, probably done from life, rather than a commissioned portrait.
In many respects the clarity of modeling in this well-preserved panel painting
is similar to that seen in works by Gerrit Dou from the early to mid-1630s.
Nevertheless, Dou’s painterly techniques are more nuanced than thoseevident

inthiswork,

ascanbeseeninacomparison

withDou’s Astronomer (Heraclitus?), ca. 1631–32, in the Hermitage (fig 1), where
the same model is depicted. Instead of the blended and smooth brushwork
and linear definition of features evident in Elderly Man, in the HermitageFig 1. Gerrit Dou, Astronomer(Heraclitus?), ca. 1628, oil on
panel, 38.5 x 31 cm, State
Hermitage Museum, St.
Petersburg, inv. 1012

painting Dou used careful parallel hatchings to help enliven the astronomer’sface. Indeed, the glint of light off the sitter’s forehead in Elderly Man is moreakin to the reflections off hard, inanimate surfaces in Dou’s Still Life with
Globe, Lute, and Books, ca. 1635 (fig 2), than in his images of livingindividuals.
The model for this tronie, who appears in multiple paintings and etchings byDou, Jan Lievens (1607–74), and Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69) around
1630, was well-known in the Leiden artistic community.[1] He is, for example,
seen in Rembrandt’s etching, Bust of an Old Man, 1630 (fig 3). This man

Fig 2. Gerrit Dou, Still Life with
Globe, Lute, and Books, ca. 1635,
oil on panel, 22.5 x 30 cm, private
collection, Montreal

also sat for Lievens, as is evident in that master’s Head of an Old Man, ca.
1629, in the National Gallery of Ireland (fig 4).[2] Since the late nineteenth
century,thismodel[3]Rembrandt’s father.

hasoftenbeenidentified

asHowever, a drawing in the Ashmolean Museum,Oxford (inv. WA1855.11), of a bearded old man bearing the inscription“HARMAN GERRITS” and signed by Rembrandt (“van de Rhijn”), depicts
an elderly man whose features clearly differ from those of the sitter in theLeiden Collection work.[4]A more likely identification of the model comes from documentation related toanother painting in which he appears: Jan Lievens’s Old Man Holding aSkull, ca. 1630 (fig 5). As Lloyd DeWitt has noted, this painting is listed in the1640 inventory of Jan Jansz. Orlers as “the keeper of the Almshouse with aFig 3. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bust ofan Old man, 1630, etching, 11.8 x
9.7 cm, Rijksprentenkabinet RP-POB-590

Skull in his hand” that was “painted from life.”[5] Two archival documents
reveal that in 1629 and 1631 the financial officer (rentmeester) of the Sint
© 2020 The Leiden Collection

Elderly Man
Page 4 of 9Catharina Gasthuys in Leiden was named Jan van Heussen, who resided inthe “Rijn” district of town.[6] An engraved portrait Jan van Heussen at the Ageof 27 by Hendrick Goltzius, dated ca. 1581 (fig 6), sufficiently resembles themodel—including early baldness and the heavy lidded eyes—to suggest thatthe model for this tronie may have been Jan van Heussen, who would havebeen seventy-five years old in 1629.[7] Regardless of the man’s identity, his
distinctive features inspired Rembrandt, Lievens and Dou, and otherunidentified artists from Leiden, to repeatedly use him as a model for tronies
and in a number of multifigure compositions.[8]Fig 4. Jan Lievens, Head of an Old
Man, ca.1629, oil on panel, 59.7 x48 cm. unframed, National Galleryof Ireland Collection, Photo ©
National Gallery of Ireland- Henriette Rahusen, 2017

Fig 5. Jan Lievens, An Old Man
Holding a Skull, ca. 1625–30, oilon panel, 61.6 x 48.3 cm, private
collection

Fig 6. Hendrick Goltzius, Jan vanHeussen at the Age of 27, ca.
1581, engraving, 4.8 x 3.5 cm,
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge,
inv. P.7330-R, Hollstein (English)
H 196© 2020 The Leiden Collection

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© 2020 The Leiden Collection

Elderly Man
Page 6 of 9Endnotes

1. For the close working relationship between Rembrandt, Lievens, and Dou, see Ronni Baer,“The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” in Ronni Baer, Gerrit Dou, 1613–1675: Master Painter in theAge of Rembrandt, ed. Arthur K. Wheelock Jr. (Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery ofArt; London, Dulwich Picture Gallery; The Hague, Mauritshuis) (Zwolle, 2000), 28–30. Painted
works by Dou in which the same model appears, other than Astronomer (Heraclitus?), include
The Tooth-Puller, ca. 1630–35 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), and Old Man Lighting a Pipe, ca.
1635 (private collection, England). Examples in which this figure appears in etchings byLievens include Bust of an Old Man (Hollstein Dutch 51-2(2); Rijksprentenkabinet, RP-POB-12.577) and Bust of an Old man in a Fur Cap (Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam, RP-POB-12.557), both ca. 1631.
2. My thanks to Dominique Surh for drawing my attention to the similarity of Lievens’s painting
in Dublin and Elderly Man.
3. Emile Michel, “La Jeunesse de Rembrandt, 3e article,” in Gazette des Beaux-Arts (August1890): 159–60. For more on the early discussion about the identity of the male model, seeArthur M. Hind, “The Portraits of Rembrandt’s Father,” Burlington Magazine 8, no. 36 (1906):
426–27, 430–31.
4. The inventory number of the drawing in the Ashmolean Museum is: WA1855.11.
Rembrandt’s father, Harmen Gerritsz van Ryn (ca. 1568–1630), was a malt miller inLeiden. Peter Schatborn has argued that the old man in the Ashmolean drawing is indeed
Rembrandt’s father because the ink used in the drawing is also used for the inscription. SeeChristiaan Vogelaar and Gerbrand Korevaar, Rembrandt’s Mother: Myth and Reality (Zwolle,2005), 189–90, no. 59. The inscription is deemed contemporary with the drawing, whichmeans that Rembrandt did leave us a drawn portrait of his father. The same old man with thebulbous nose appears as Man Trimming a Quill, ca. 1627–28, by Jan Lievens (formerlyKisters Collection, Kreuzlingen). See Vogelaar and Korevaar, Rembrandt’s Mother, 150, fig.
108.
5. “…de Coster van het Gasthuys met een Dootshooft inden arm.” See: R. E. O. Ekkart and M.
L. Wurfbain, eds., Geschildert tot Leyden anno 1626 (Exh. cat. Leiden, Stedelijk Museum deLakenhal) (Leiden, 1976), 18; also Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., ed. Jan Lievens: A Dutch MasterRediscovered (Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee ArtMuseum; Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 124–25, no. 122,
repro. In pose and use of the same model, Lievens’s Old Man Holding a Skull seems directlyrelated to his etching Bust of an Old Man (Hollstein Dutch 51-2(2); Rijksprentenkabinet, RP-POB-12.577) mentioned above.
6. For Van Heussen as rentmeester, see the inventory of the Sint Catharinagasthuys, Regionaal© 2020 The Leiden Collection

Elderly ManPage 7 of 9Archief Leiden, Gasthuizen, arch. 504, inv. I.1.3.26 and 27. For his residency in the Rijnneighborhood, see RAL, arch. 501A, inv. 1318, 6 March 1631. The mill of Rembrandt’s
father, the Pelicaen (#108 on the Blaeu map), stood along the stretch of water listed as “DenRijn” on Joan Blaeu’s detailed map of Leiden of 1649. This indicates that the patronym ofboth Harmen Gerritsz as well as Rembrandt came from the location of the family’s mill: bothwere “van den Rijn” (“from the Rijn”). In 1622, the Lievens family lived closer to the center oftown, in the Pieterskerk Choorsteeg (#87 on the Blaeu map).
7. From at least 18 June 1580 to 15 November 1597, Jan Cornelisz van Heussen is identified as
the Schout tot Noordwijk (sheriff ) in two notarial records in the Leiden city archives. The
office of Schout would have been held by a well-respected member of the local elite.
Noordwijk is a village 7.5 miles northwest of Leiden, Noordwijkerhout is a suburb of
Noordwijk. Archief Leiden, nr. 0506, inv. 9, folio 150 (1580) and nr. 0506, inv. 61, folio 184v
(1597).
8. Examples include Bust of an Old Man, 1630, in the Tiroler Landesmuseum Ferdinandeum,Innsbruck, and Study of an Old Man, 1630–31, in the Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis, TheHague, both by Rembrandt; and Jan Lievens’s Tric-Trac Players in an Inn, ca. 1624 (SpierCollection, Cape Town) and “Sultan Soliman”, ca. 1629–31 (Gemäldegalerie, Potsdam). For
these works, see Arthur K. Wheelock Jr., ed. Jan Lievens: A Dutch Master Rediscovered(Exh. cat. Washington D.C., National Gallery of Art; Milwaukee, Milwaukee Art Museum;
Amsterdam, Museum Het Rembrandthuis) (New Haven, 2008), 86, fig. 2, and 118–19, no. 19.

Provenance
Private collection, The Netherlands [Marina Aarts, Amsterdam, 2006].
From whom acquired by the present owner.

Exhibition History
Leiden, Lakenhal Museum, “Gerrit Dou: The Leiden Collection from New York,” 9 March–31
August 2014 [lent by the present owner].
Kingston, Queen’s University, Agnes Etherington Art Centre, “Leiden circa 1630: RembrandtEmerges,” 24 August–1 December 2019; Edmonton, Art Gallery of Alberta, 7 March–2 July
2020; Regina, MacKenzie Art Gallery, 22 August 2020–3 January 2021; Hamilton, Art Galleryof Hamilton, 13 February–30 May 2021, no. 15 [lent by the present owner].
© 2020 The Leiden Collection

Elderly Man
Page 8 of 9References
Surh, Dominique, Ilona van Tuinen, and John Twilley. “Insights from Technical Analysis on aGroup of Paintings by Gerrit Dou in the Leiden Collection.” JHNA 6:1 (Winter 2014): n. 12.
DOI:10.5092/jhna.2014.6.1.3
Coutré, Jacquelyn N., Ed. Leiden circa 1630: Rembrandt Emerges. Exh. cat. Kingston, AgnesEtherington; Edmonton, Art Gallery of Alberta; Hamilton, Art Gallery of Hamilton. Kingston,
2019, 186-89, no. 15.

VersionsRelated Print

1. Rembrandt van Rijn, Bust of an Old Man, 1630, etching, 11.8 x 9.7 cm, Rijksprentenkabinet,
inv. no. RP-P-OB-590.

Technical Summary
The painting is executed on a composite panel comprised of two vertically grained and oriented
oak planks, stemming from different trees of Baltic origin, felled between 1611 and 1620.[1] The
vertical join is located (ca. 20.5 cm from the left edge) through the center of the composition,directly through the sitter’s face. A portion of the left plank has been previously planed and islighter in color. Two rectangular 3.5 cm H x 6 cm W, horizontally grained, rectangular wooden
cleats have been adhered to the upper and center portions of the panel join with a radio-opaqueadhesive. There are thin remnants of a third cleat along the lower portion of the panel join.
There are wide, shallow bevels along all four edges. The panel has a very slight convex warp
when viewed from the front and is of slightly varying thickness, ranging from 0.3 to 0.5 cm. Inaddition, a narrow bevel along the entire width of the reverse of the lower edge is the result of thecomposite panel being prepared for tree ring analyses by Dr. Peter Klein in September 2006 andby Ian Tyers in November 2010.
There are no wax seals, panel maker’s marks or import stamps.
A light-colored ground has been thinly and evenly applied and the oil (est.) paint has been built up
in successive thin layers. Both the paint and ground spill over onto the thickness of the paneledges slightly along all four edges.
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No underdrawing is evident in infrared photography at 780, 750, or 1000 nanometers, and there
are no pentimenti or compositional changes visible in the X-radiograph or infrared images.
The painting is unsigned and undated.
Damar varnish was thinly and evenly applied by brush in 2006 and by spray in July 2008.[2] It hasa satin finish and saturates the image.

Technical Summary Endnotes

1. According to Ian Tyers dendrochronology report dated November 2010.
2. According to Nancy Krieg’s private conservation treatment notes and discussions with Nancy
Krieg’s former assistant Kirsten Younger, who treated this painting.

© 2020 The Leiden Collection