Gerbrand van den Eeckhout(Amsterdam 1621 – 1674Amsterdam)

How To CiteBakker, Piet. "Gerbrand van den Eeckhout." In The Leiden Collection Catalogue. Edited by Arthur K.
Wheelock Jr. New York, 2017.
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout was baptized in Amsterdam on 22 August 1621. His parents were thegoldsmith Jan Pieters van den Eeckhout and Grietje Claes Leydeckers.[1] Gerbrand’s father was born in1583 in Harlingen (in the province of Friesland), but was not Frisian. His father Pieter Lodewijcks (b. 1544),
a Mennonite peddler, came from Brussels, from which he had fled for religious reasons. After temporary
sojourns in ‘s-Hertogenbosch and Harlingen, where Pieter married Marritge Jans van Winterswijk, heultimately acquired citizenship in Amsterdam in 1588. Five years later, Gerbrand’s father and the latter’selder brother Lodewijck were both baptized as Protestants.
In 1612 Jan Pieters bought two buildings on the Kalverstraat. He turned them into a single residence called’t Vliegend Paert, which was home to three generations of the family. Gerbrand, who never married, may
have lived there well into adulthood, for he gave the Kalverstraat as his address in documents up to1662.[2] This is also the address where his father was taxed for assets worth 4000 guilders in 1631,
indicating that the family’s circumstances were modest in these years.
Jan Pieters’s affluence and social standing grew substantially when, in 1633, two years after the death ofGrietje, he took a second wife, namely Cornelia Dedel (1594–1660) from Delft. Her parents were Willem
Dedel and Ida van der Dussen, the daughter of a well-to-do brewer. Dedel—himself a brewer in Delft and adirector of the Dutch East India Company—was affluent, and as the son of a Leiden draper andburgomaster, belonged to the local patriciate. His brother-in-law was Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg(1537–1614), the famous Leiden portrait painter and burgomaster, and father of Rembrandt’s firstteacher.[3]According to Houbraken, Van den Eeckhout was “a pupil of Rembrandt van Rijn.”[4] He would have gone tostudy under him at the age of fourteen.[5] He painted his earliest work in 1640.[6] This usually suggests
independence, but given his young age, it is unlikely that he already had his own studio. Upon finishing histraining, he may have stayed on for a while with his master, enjoying a privileged position. Perhaps heworked side by side with Ferdinand Bol (1616–80) in Rembrandt’s workshop, as his early paintings display
a great similarity with works by Bol.[7] Whatever his position, Van den Eeckhout must have been on good© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Gerbrand van den Eeckhout
Page 2 of 5terms with his master, for in his biography of Roelant Roghman (1627–92), Houbraken noted that Roghman“along with Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, [was] a great friend of Rembrandt van Rijn in his time.”[8] ThatRoghman and Van den Eeckhout were good friends emerges from the will that the latter executed in 1674,
in which he calls Roghman “an old acquaintance” and remembers him with 50 guilders.[9]Van den Eeckhout was an exceptionally productive and versatile artist. About two hundred paintings havebeen attributed to him, along with countless drawings, etchings, book illustrations, and—doubtless inspiredby his father’s profession—pattern books for gold- and silversmiths. He painted primarily history scenes,
generally of biblical subjects, as well as portraits. His treatment of light and his handling of paint in these
portraits recall Rembrandt, but in terms of composition he followed the prevailing fashion. Many
commissions came from his immediate surroundings, such as the portraits of his stepmother, Cornelia
Dedel (1644), and of his father (1644, 1651), among others.[10] In addition, in 1657 and 1673 he portrayed
the officers of the Coopers and Wine Rackers’ Guild; the former commission would have come via hisbrother Jan, who was a wine merchant.[11]Van den Eeckhout was a history and portrait painter, but from the early 1650s he also acquitted himself well
as a genre painter. This turn was no doubt dictated by the deteriorating market, which led to increasingly
fierce competition and spurred artists to pursue new avenues.[12] If he was a follower as a history andportrait painter, he proved to be an innovator as a genre painter. His guardroom scenes from 1651 onward
are still indebted to other artists, such as Anthonie Palamedesz (1601-73), but Van den Eeckhout’s
depictions of elegant companies disporting themselves on terraces or in elegant interiors were ahead of
their time.
In addition to Rembrandt and Roghman, Van den Eeckhout was also acquainted with the landscape painterWillem Schellinks (1626–78), the poet David Questiers (1623–63), and the bookseller Hieronymus Sweerts(1629–96). They all loved poetry and exchanged poems they had penned themselves.[13] Moreover, he wasin touch with the well-known rector Jacob Heyblock (1620–90), making several contributions to his famous
Album Amicorum. For instance, in 1654 Van den Eeckhout wrote some lines of verse for a fine drawing hehad made of Hermes and Argus, and next to an Ysvermaakje (scene of amusement on the ice) drawn byJan van de Cappelle (1626–79). In these lines Van den Eeckhout honored that artist “who had taught
himself to paint of his own volition”[14] and whom he had portrayed one year earlier.[15]During the last years of his life, Van den Eeckhout lived with Maria van Schilperoort, the widow of hisbrother Jan, on the elegant Herengracht (nowadays number 525), close to the Vijzelstraat.[16] In September
1674 he fell seriously ill and drew up his will. To his sister Ida he left “a picture painted by him, the testator,
and already hanging in her house,” and to his sister Margaretha “a picture equal in worth to the one hebequeathed to his sister Ida, to be taken from the works he will leave behind and which will be assessed bysomeone who is knowledgeable about paintings.” To his nephew/cousin and godchild, Gerbrand, hebequeathed “all of his art on paper and works in clay, consisting of prints, drawings, and sculpted figures
and animals, so that he might enjoy the proceeds he will gain by putting them up for auction.”[17] Van den
Eeckhout died a few days later, and was taken from the Herengracht to the Oudezijds Kapel to be buried in
the family grave on 26 September 1674.
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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout
Page 3 of 5-Piet Bakker

Endnotes
1. Her parents were the cobbler Claes Gerbrandts and Marie Willems, whose brother Jan Claes
Leydeckers witnessed Gerbrand’s baptism and was later portrayed by Rembrandt van Rijn in
the Nightwatch.
2. Moreover, in 1655 he was appointed sergeant of the civic guard in the district to which theKalverstraat belonged. See Abraham Bredius Archive, Netherlands Institute for Art History(RKD), The Hague.
3. Cornelia’s cousin/nephew, Huybrecht Dedel, is called a painter in a few Leiden documents,
but no work by him is known.
4. “Een Leerling van Rembrant van Ryn.” Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh derNederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen, 3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1718–21; rev. ed., TheHague, 1753; reprint, Amsterdam, 1980), 2:100.
5. Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker, Algemeines Lexikon der bildenden Kunstler 37 vols. (Leipzig,1907–50), 10: 355.
6. Gideon Visited by the Angel, oil on canvas, 64 x 75 cm, signed and dated 1640 (or 1644 inSumowski), Nationalmuseum, Stockholm.
7. Ferdinand Bol’s apprenticeship with Rembrandt lasted from 1636 to 1642 and so overlapped
considerably with that of Van den Eeckhout. See Walter Liedtke, “Rembrandt’s ‘Workshop’Revisited,” Oud-Holland 117 (2004): 68. After his training with Rembrandt, Van den Eeckhout isthought to have worked for some time with a follower of Pieter Lastman (1583–1633), forexample Claes Moyaert, given that his approach to biblical themes, and primarily his rendering offigures, are definitely indebted to Lastman.
8. “In zyn tyd, met Gerbrant van den Eekhout, een groot vriend [was] van Rembrant van Ryn.”
Arnold Houbraken, De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en schilderessen ,3 vols. (Amsterdam, 1718–21; rev. ed., The Hague, 1753; reprint, Amsterdam, 1980), 1:174.
9. “Een oude bekende.” See Stadsarchief Amsterdam, Notarial Archives, no. 2179 (film 2275)(notary A. Lock) fol. 97–104, 19 September 1674.
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10. The portrait of his stepmother is in a private collection; the 1644 portrait of his father is in theMusée de Grenoble. See Adolph Staring, “Portretten door Gerbrand van den Eeckhout,”OudHolland 63 (1948): 180. Another portrait of his father dating from 1651 can no longer beidentified. See ibid., 182.
11. Officers of the Coopers and Wine Rackers’ Guild , oil on canvas,163 x 197 cm, signed anddated 1657, National Gallery, London, in which his brother Jan van den Eeckhout is also
portrayed. Officers of the Coopers and Wine Rackers’ Guild , oil on canvas, 211.5 x 253 cm,signed and dated 1673, Amsterdams Museum, Amsterdam.
12. Piet Bakker, “Crisis? Welke crisis? Enkele kanttekeningen bij het economisch verval van deschilderkunst in Leiden na 1660,” De Zeventiende Eeuw 27 (2011): 232–70.
13. A. D. de Vries, “Willem Schellinks,” Oud-Holland 1 (1883): 151–52.
14. “Die de schilderkunst by hem selfs uyt eygen lust [heeft] geleert.” Kees Thomassen and J. A.
Gruys, eds., The Album Amicorum of Jacob Heyblocq: Introduction, Transcriptions,Paraphrases, and Notes to the Facsimile (Zwolle, 1998), 173–74.
15. Oil on canvas, 75.5 x 57.7 cm, signed and dated 1653, Amsterdams Museum, Amsterdam.
This portrait may be identical to the one listed in Jan van de Capelle’s 1680 inventory. Hanging
in the voorhuis (front parlor) was “Een conterfeytsel sijnde den Overleden [van] Eeckhout” (alikeness of the deceased [by] Eeckhout). See Abraham Bredius, “De schilder Johannes van deCappelle,” Oud-Holland 10 (1892): 29.
16. H. F. Wijnman et al., Vier eeuwen Heerengracht, oneven (Amsterdam, 1976), 346.
According to Wijnman, Van den Eeckhout lived with his stepmother, Cornelia Dedel, yet this isimpossible given that she died in 1660. On the basis of (possibly) his will of 1674, drawn up on
the Herengracht, Manuth assumes that Van den Eeckhout lived with Maria van Schilperoort, hisbrother’s widow. He bequeathed her 300 guilders and stipulated that “ingevalle hij op sijn
Overlijden noch bij sijn voornoemde behout-suster mochte inwoonen” (in the event that at hisdeath he was still living with his above-mentioned sister-in-law), she would receive room andboard from him for the period he lived with her prior to his death. See Stadsarchief Amsterdam,
Notarial Archives, no. 2179 (film 2275) (notary A. Lock) fol. 97–104, 19 September 1674.

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Gerbrand van den Eeckhout
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17. “Een stuck schilderij door hem testateur geschildert ‘t haeren huys alreede hangende”; “eenstuck schilderij van gelijcke waerde als aen sijne suster Ida gelegateert, te nemen uyt deschilderijen die hij sal comen naer te laten tot seggen van yemandt kennisse van schilderijen
hebbende”; “alle sijn Papiere Kunst en geboetseert goet, bestaende in Printen, Teyckeningen en
geboedseerde beeltgens en beesges, om de penningen die daervan by publique vendutie sullen
comen te procederen by hem genooten te werden.” See Stadsarchief Amsterdam, NotarialArchives, no. 2179 (film 2275) (notary A. Lock) fol. 97–104, 19 September 1674.

Literature
Houbraken, Arnold. De groote schouburgh der Nederlantsche konstschilders en
schilderessen.

3 vols. Amsterdam, 1718–21; rev. ed., The Hague, 1753; reprint,Amsterdam, 1980, 2:100–1.
Scheffer, J. H. “Eenige bijzonderheden betrekkelijk de familie van den beroemden
Nederlandschen Schilder Gerbrand van den Eeckhout.” Algemeen Nederlandsch
Familieblad (1884): 1–4, no. 104, 2–4, no. 105.
Van der Crab, A. J. E. “Het geslacht van den Eeckhout.” De Nederlandsche Leeuw 13(1895): 61–63.
Van Gelder, J. G. “Gerbrand van den Eeckhout als portrettist.” Kunsthistorische
mededelingen van het Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorisch Documentatie 1 (1946): 56–58.
Staring, Adolph. “Portretten door Gerbrand van den Eeckhout.” Oud-Holland 63 (1948):
180–88.
Manuth, Volker. “Twee portretten van de Amsterdamse boekhandelaar-historicus Isaac
Commelin door Gerbrand van den Eeckhout en Pieter van Anraedt.” Amstelodamum 89(2002): 3–11.
Manuth, Volker. “’Een kindskontrefeijtsel, antycqs gedaen’ und ‘een … van Scipio africanus’.
Zu zwei neuidentifizierten Gemälden des Gerbrand van den Eeckhout.” Oud-Holland 112(1998): 139–50.
Manuth, Volker. “Gerbrand van den Eeckhout.” In Allgemeines Künstlerlexikon. Vol. 23.
Munich and Leipzig, 2002, 235.
Liedtke, Walter. “Rembrandt’s ‘Workshop’ Revisited.” Oud-Holland 117 (2004): 48–73, esp.
68.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection