Portrait of a Woman

ca. 1675–85

Godefridus Schalcken(Made 1643 – 1706 The Hague)

oil on copper
13.4 x 10.9 cm
signed with a monogram in dark paint along
background, lower left quadrant: “G. S.”
GS-110© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Woman
Page 2 of 7

How To Cite
Jansen, Guido. "Portrait of a Woman." In The Leiden Collection Catalogue. Edited by Arthur K. Wheelock
Jr. New York, 2017.
https://www.theleidencollection.com/archive/.
This page is available on the site's Archive. PDF of every version of this page is available on the Archive,and the Archive is managed by a permanent URL. Archival copies will never be deleted. New versions areadded only when a substantive change to the narrative occurs.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Woman
Page 3 of 7

The art of painting portrait miniatures in the Northern and Southern

Comparative Figures

Netherlands has little to do with “the art of limning” as it was practiced inEngland and France. English miniatures, which were usually executed ingouache, watercolor or enamel, differ from those produced in the Low
Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In Holland andFlanders, such portraits were commonly painted in oil on a support ofwood or metal (usually copper). Moreover, unlike the English specialists inthis field, the artists who painted portrait miniatures in the Netherlands
never considered miniatures their main activity. They painted these tiny
portraits alongside their regular work.
The production of miniature portraits in the Netherlands was certainly not aLeiden specialty.[1] Nevertheless, it is striking that many Leiden
artists—among them Gerrit Dou (1613–75); Frans van Mieris (1635–81),

Fig 1. Godefridus Schalcken,
Portrait of Coenraet Ruysch(1650-1731), May 1674, 9.2 x 7.5cm, Private Collection, TheNetherlands, © Dordrechts
Museum / Marco de Nood

his sons Jan (1660–90) and Willem (1662–1747), and his grandson Frans
II (1689–1763); Pieter van Slingelandt (1640–91); Ary de Vois(1630/35–80); Carel de Moor (1655–1738); and Godefridus Schalcken—produced signed work of this kind, not to mention the portrait miniatures
attributable to Pieter Leermans (ca. 1670–85).[2] That such small
likenesses enjoyed a certain degree of popularity was due in part to theirrelatively modest price, but above all to their intimate nature: they wereeasy to carry around, and could even be worn on clothing. Schalcken’sPortrait of Maria Anna of Pfalz-Neuburg (1667–1740), Consort of CarlosII, King of Spain of 1690 is but one example.[3]Despite its considerable popularity among Dutch artists and sitters in theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the portrait miniature is no longer
held in such high esteem, certainly not in the art historical literature.
Schalcken’s contribution to this specialty is definitely the least appreciatedpart of his oeuvre. Up to now, portrait miniatures by his hand have been
discussed merely in entries in catalogues raisonnés of his work.
Beherman’s book includes only nine, and not all of them are bySchalcken.[4] Since Beherman’s publication, however, at least six more
portrait miniatures signed by Schalcken have been found.[5]One such recently discovered portrait is this exceptionally finePortrait of aWoman, which the painter signed in monogram at the lower left. We see
the young woman turning her head to her left as she looks at us with wide
open eyes. She wears a blue-green dress with a low neckline, over which© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Woman
Page 4 of 7

is draped a transparent ruche, held in place by a bejeweled broach. A
string of pearls adorns her neck, but her most striking feature is her hairdo,
a hurluberlu coiffure, in which the hair is drawn to the sides and falls inlarge ringlets over the shoulders. The rest of her hair is combed back andbound up in a large knot, or chignon, consisting of rolled-up braids. The
chignon is held together by the string of pearls woven through it. The
woman’s ears are decorated with pendant earrings made of gold wire anda large cut stone, probably a rock crystal. The light falls fully on her faceand neck. The shadow at the left emphasizes the contours of the young
lady’s pretty face and sets it off from the background.
The hurluberlu coiffure makes it fairly easy to date the tiny portrait,
because this hairdo became fashionable in Paris only after 1670.
Moreover, the signature—the monogram G.S.—indicates that the portrait
could not have been painted very early in the 1670s. Until around 1675
Schalcken customarily signed even the smallest of his works in full. He did
this on two miniatures with genre scenes, but more relevant in the present
context is the full signature on the portrait miniature of Coenraet Ruysch(1650–1731) (fig 1), which Schalcken must have painted before Ruysch
embarked on his Grand Tour in May 1674.[6] The other portrait miniaturesby his hand were all produced later and bear his monogram, which meansthat this Portrait of a Woman can be dated to between ca. 1675 and theearly 1680s, before the hurluberlu coiffure went out of fashion and was
succeeded by the high Fontange coiffure (see GS-106).
A recently discovered portrait miniature is Portrait of a Man in a White
Wig.[7] It is painted on copper, like the Portrait of a Woman, and is almost
identical in size. Furthermore, it also bears Schalcken’s monogram. This
male portrait can be dated to around 1680–85, so it is quite possible thatthese two portraits once formed a pair.
Incidentally, Schalcken’s activities in the field of miniature portraiture may
well have prompted other painters in Dordrecht to attempt somethingsimilar. Schalcken’s pupil Arnoldus Boonen (1669–1729), at any rate, also
painted portraits in miniature format, as did Barend Kalraet and Arnold
Houbraken.
-Guido Jansen© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Woman
Page 5 of 7Endnotes
1. Among the many Dutch masters who created portrait miniatures were David Baudringhien,
Job Berckheyde, Gerard ter Borch, Cornelis Jonson van Ceulen, Gerrit Lundens, Simon
Luttichuys, Michiel van Musscher, Cornelis van Poelenburch, Abraham Snaphaen, HendrickSorgh, Jan Verkolje, Daniel Vertangen, and Adriaen van der Werff. Tiny portraits in oilremained popular remained popular in eighteenth-century Holland, which led such artists asCornelis Troost, Jan Stolker, and Jan Maurits Quinkhard to practice this specialty.
2. See Peeter Leermans, Portrait of a Man, PLe-100.
3. Johnny van Haeften, Dutch and Flemish Old Master Paintings 18 (London, 2011), no. 26;
more examples are to be found in Diana Scarisbrick,Portait Jewels: Opulence and Intimacy
from the Medici to the Romanovs (London, 2011).
4. Thierry Beherman, Godfried Schalcken (Paris, 1988), nos. 69, 70, 102, 108, 123, 124, 228,230, and 268. I am not certain that nos. 70 and 230 are by Schalcken. I define a miniature as
having an admittedly arbitrary maximum height of 15 cm.
5. The six portrait miniatures in question include portrayals of Pieter Teding van Berkhout (RKD
(Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie/Netherlands Institute for Art History) no.
123967) and his wife, Elisabeth Ruysch (RKD (Rijksbureau voor KunsthistorischeDocumentatie/Netherlands Institute for Art History) no. 123968); her brother CoenraadRuysch (RKD (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie/Netherlands Institute for ArtHistory) no. 208865); and a woman who was probably the artist’s wife, Françoisia vanDiemen (RKD (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie/Netherlands Institute for ArtHistory) no. 198197); as well as the Portrait of a Man in a White Wig (see note 7), and thepresent painting.
6. Guido M. C. Jansen, “Ferdinand Voet and Coenraad Ruysch,” The Burlington
Magazine 153 (2011): fig. 20 (oil on copper, 9.2 x 7.5 cm, oval). The portrait of the Leiden
poet Willem van Heemskerck (oil on panel, 10 x 7 cm, oval) of 1676 is, as far as I know, theearliest dated portrait miniature with Schalcken’s monogram. This small panel is not in
Beherman, though it is included in Cornelis Hofstede de Groot, Beschreibendes undkritisches Verzeichnis der Werke der hervorragendsten höllandischen Maler desXVII. Jahrhunderts, 10 vols. (Esslingen and Paris, 1907–28), 5:411, no. 306. For several
early and fully signed genre pieces in miniature format, see Thierry Beherman, GodfriedSchalcken (Paris, 1988), nos. 133 and 135.
7. Sale, New York (Sotheby’s), 27 January 2011, lot 280; signed in monogram; oil on copper,
13.2 x 10.9 cm.

© 2017 The Leiden Collection

Portrait of a Woman
Page 6 of 7

Provenance(Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 8 January 2008, no. 298).
From whom acquired by the present owner in 2008.

Technical Summary
The support, an oval-shaped copper sheet, has burrs along the edges. There are no obvious
hammer or roll marks, but the copper has substantial weight and does not flex when handled.[1]The copper remains in plane with no indentations. There is a brown mottled oxidation layer
followed by a hazy white layer along the reverse. There are no wax seals, stamps, stencils orlabels along the reverse.
No ground is visible.[2] The paint has been applied smoothly wet-into-wet through thebackground and hair, smoothly with dry paint and visible brushwork through the flesh tones, andwith low rounded dots to create the highlights of the pearl necklace, gold earring, and jewel along
the mousseline. Raised pin-sized dots of paint, particularly along the left half of the brownbackground, appear to be gritty inclusions or the result of oxidation products.
No underdrawing is readily apparent in infrared images captured at 780–1000 nanometers, andno compositional changes are visible in the images or as pentimenti. There is no X-radiograph ofthe painting.
The painting is signed with a monogram in dark paint in the background along the lower left
quadrant but is undated.
The painting was cleaned and restored in 2008 and remains in a good state of preservation.

Technical Summary Endnotes

1. According to Isabel Horovitz, Copper as Canvas: Two Centuries of Masterpiece
Paintings on Copper, 1575–1775 (New York, 1999), 67–68, “a highly worked sheet ofcopper will be less flexible than one that is not highly worked, and this is why quite thin (0.5mm) sheets of copper can provide such excellent rigid supports for paint films.”
2. The painting was examined on-site with no stereomicroscope. Magnification with 5X
Optivisor.
2.

© 2017 The Leiden CollectionPowered by TCPDF (www.tcpdf.org)

Portrait of a Woman
Page 7 of 7

© 2017 The Leiden Collection