Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:Abraham van der Eyk (1684 – 1726)
Allegory on the Synod of Dort and the dispute between the Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants Oil on canvas: 53 x 75 cm. Signed and dated upper center: ‘Abr Vand Eyck / Fecit Anno 1721’ Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, Lyon, inv. no. H 1151.
This historical allegory of the theological dispute between the Arminianists and their Gomarists opponents was painted by the Leiden-based genre artist Abraham van der Eyk in 1721. The Remonstrants, including Hugo Grotius, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, and Rombout Hogerbeets (third from left) are positioned to the left of the composition, whilst their opponents, led by Prince Maurtis, are shown on the right. The scales of justice between them shows the Gomarist cause as heavier than the Arminian one, thanks to a sword that weighs it down in their favour. The sword symbolises state support endorsed by the Dutch Reformed Church in the interests of the Prince Maurit’s vision for the Republic.
Open a larger version of the following image in a popup:Willem Jacobsz. Delff (1580 – 1638), after Jan van Ravesteyn
Rombout Hogerbeets Engraving on paper: 23.4 x 13.9 cm. Printed 1619 British Museum, London (object number: O,6.162)
The assertive gaze of Rombout Hogerbeets (1561 – 1625), here shown as a grandee of the Dutch legal profession, indicates his renowned strength of mind and character as one of the most successful diplomats in the Dutch Republic during the early decades of the seventeenth century. Dressed in a rich silk doublet, which is partially covered by a fur-lined cloak, and a gently folded linen ruff, this portrait was likely commissioned ahead of an important diplomatic mission to resolve the Kalmar War between Sweden and Denmark or, quite simply, to commemorate his 50th birthday.
(Possibly) G.J. Jantson (d.c. 1816), Dordrecht; his sale
A.H. de Hart, Dordrecht, 24 April 1816, lot 120 (as ‘Een Pourtrait van Hogerbeets’); bt. by
François-Jules Mensart (d.c. 1824), supervisor of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; his sale
Cornelis François Roos, Amsterdam, 2 September 1824, lot 42 (as ‘Twee stuks, Portretten van Oldebarneveld en Hoogerbeets, door denzelven’); bt. by
Gérard Leembruggen (1801 – 1865), Amsterdam;
Elias de Bourbon-Parma (1880 – 1959), Duke of Parma and Piacenza;
sold by 1968 when in private collection, USA; by descent until
Skinner’s, Boston, 18 November 2005, lot 19 (as ‘School of Cornelis de Vos, Portrait of Pieter Joncheijn’); bt. by
Private collection, USA.
Originally from the village of Beets in North Holland, the Hogerbeets family moved to the harbour town of Hoorn in the early sixteenth century. Heyndrick Dircksz. Hogerbeets, the grandfather of the present portrait’s subject, held the office of mayor several times in Hoorn, as did his son, Dr. Dirck Hogerbeets. The present portrait’s sitter, Rombout Hogerbeets, was born to Dirck Hogerbeets and his wife Machteld van Steynemolen in 1561.
Seven years later, the Hogerbeets family fled Hoorn due to the invading Catholic Spanish troops and settled, like many other Dutch Protestants, in Wezel, where they stayed until 1572 when the city of Hoorn declared its loyalties to the stadtholder, Willem the Silent. Dirck Hogerbeets was able to reclaim the family’s assets, which had been confiscated by the Spanish, and in 1582 he was elected mayor of Hoorn for the first time.
After a classical education, Rombouts matriculated as a law student at the recently established university in Leiden in 1578, where he would eventually earn a doctorate. Upon graduation, he practiced in Leiden and, in 1590, he was appointed a councillor and Grand Pensionary, the city’s leading legal official. The next year he married Hillegonda Wentzen (1557 – 1620), daughter of Adriaan Wentzen, pensionary of Dordrecht and councilor in the Supreme Court (‘Hoge Raad’).
Hogerbeets’s legal career peaked when he was appointed a justice for Holland’s Hoge Raad, like his father-in-law, in 1596, which would see his reputation and influence grow throughout the provinces. His diplomatic wisdom was revered beyond Leiden and he was sent on several cases around Holland; one of his most notable cases came in 1608 when he received an appeal from the Grand Pensionary of the States-General, Johan van Oldenbarnevelt (1547 – 1619), to persuade the Amsterdam city council to join the other provinces in ratifying a temporary truce with Spain during the Eighty Years War. Thanks in part to Hogerbeets's diplomatic skills, Van Oldenbarnevelt was finally able to count on a majority in the States of Holland in favour of the truce with Spain. A year later he acted on behalf of the Stadtholder Prince Maurits (1567 – 1625) to settle growing conflicts between Arminians and Gomarists in Alkmaar. Despite successfully resolving it by establishing a new city council, his affiliation with both Protestant groups would take an ironic twist later in his career.
In July 1611, the year the present portrait was painted, Hogerbeets was elected a member of the diplomatic mission of the States-General of the Netherlands to mediate between Denmark and Sweden in relation to the Kalmar War, which had badly affected Dutch commerce. Although the peace talks were unproductive in the immediate term, they were resolved two years later after growing international pressures. During his time as a judge for the Hoge Raad, Hogerbeets and his family were based in The Hague, but they returned to Leiden, where he reassumed his position as Grand Pensionary, when he renounced his judgeship in 1617.
Hogerbeets was an advocate for regional sovereignty and, thus, a supporter of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt’s ‘Sharp Resolution’ bill of 1617, which authorised city’s regents, such as Hogerbeets, to raise private armies called waardgelders, as well as favouring the power for individual city councils to be responsible for the administration of justice within their own jurisdictions. The stadtholder Prince Maurits considered these small, though widely dispersed factions as potentially damaging to his influence and authority as commander-in-chief of the United Provinces’ state army and, when Hogerbeets met with fellow Remonstrant regents, including Oldenbarnevelt and Hugo Grotius (1583 – 1645), in Utrecht to discuss a political strategy to challenge the states on their autonomy, arrested them under a collective conspiracy charge.[1]
Oldenbarnevelt and Gilles van Ledenberg (c.1550 – 1618), as the more senior ‘revolutionaries’, were sentenced to death; Ledenberg died before the trail but his embalmed corpse was publically hanged within its coffin regardless. Despite Hogerbeets’s legal background and popular reputation, he was denied many civil and legal rights, which culminated in him being denied the chance to defend himself at his trial in 1619, where he was quickly – without procedure - convicted of treason. Along with Grotius, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and had to forfeit all of his assets. They were initially kept in isolation at Loevestein Castle, which had been specially requisitioned as a prison for political prisoners like Hogerbeets and Grotius, but their wives were eventually allowed to join them in their cells; tragically, Hogerbeets’s wife quickly fell ill on her arrival and died on her birthday in 1620. Disturbingly, the guards left her corpse in the cell for three days before removing it, which must have proved deeply traumatic to her husband.
When Frederick Henry succeeded his brother as the stadtholder of the United Provinces in mid-1625, Hogerbeets was partially pardoned and allowed to retire, under house arrest, to a house in Wassenaar. Unfortunately, he died after only a few months’ worth of ‘freedom’ and was buried, with honourable ceremony, in the Grote Kerk in The Hague.[2] Hugo Grotius remarked that Hogerbeets was the perfect scholar, which may have been inspired by one of Hogerbeets’s best known publications, Short introduction to the practice for the Court of Justice in Holland [1622], which was written whilst they were imprisoned together. Similarly, an unknown author wrote a short biography of Hogerbeets in Hoorn’s Chronicle, which described him as 'an impressively learned man, eloquent, diligent, brave, upright, peaceable and grand in his judgment, a very great theologian and lawyer, incorruptible, conscientious...”.
The present painting is the prime original portrait from which all likenesses of Hogerbeets are based, notably a print by Willem Jacobsz. Delff (1580 – 1638), which was published in the sitter’s lifetime, but also later historical vignettes on stained glass and porcelain (figs. 1 – 4). Petrus Scriverius (1576 – 1660), one Leiden’s most distinguished cultural figures, wrote the following epigram, intended as the caption for the Delff print, that was published in 1619 when Hogerbeets was sentenced to life imprisonment:
“This is Hogerbeets's appearance when he came from Sweden
Last as an embassy in Holland we'd reappeared, So when he spoke he was for the honor of the country;
You, Leiden and Hoorn, your wise counselor. The steadfast of the sorrows, the faithful father of the laws, A pious man of heart, doing justice to all. With permission, Bataviers, give me a note of this, Where is the wages of such a good man?”[3]
The print was immediately banned and withdrawn from sale, and Scriverius’s praise of Hogerbeets resulted in a fine of 200 guilders, which he refused to pay. Instead he offered the bailiff his book collection, purportedly saying: “These books taught me how to tell justice from injustice: these caused the offence, so let the fine too be taken from them.”[4]
~
The artist of this portrait, Jan Anthonisz. van Ravesteyn (c.1572 - 1657), was one of the most important Northern Netherlandish portrait painters of the first half of the seventeenth century, and the leading portraitist of the Dutch center of government, The Hague, where the sitter was based when this portrait was painted in 1611. Ravesteyn was primarily working for the Stadtholder's Court, but also for local patricians and the upper classes of other cities in the Southern part of Holland and Zeeland.
His earliest signed work is the famous tondo portrait of the young Hugo Grotius, dated 1599 (Fondation Custodia, Paris), painted a year after he had become a member of The Hague’s Guild of St Luke. As early as 1604, the art historian Karel van Mander mentioned the artist as one of the most competent portraitists of his time. The general style and concept of Ravesteyn’s work is closely related to that of the Delft portraitist Michiel Jansz. van Mierevelt (1567 - 1641), who was likely his master, but the younger artist’s works tend to be more elegant and flattering.
From 1611, the year Ravesteyn painted Hogerbeets’s portrait, to 1624, he painted a series of portraits of high-ranking military officers from the stadholder’s court in The Hague; twenty-five of these works have been preserved and are kept at the Mauritshuis in The Hague. The artist’s patrons include leading citizens of The Hague, who were mainly government functionaries from other cities who were temporarily stationed in The Hague.
After 1641, when his last portraits are dated, van Ravesteyn apparently painted little or not at all, but in 1656 he was still mentioned as a doyen in the rolls of artists who were invited to become members of The Hague’s newly founded artists’ society, ‘Pictura’. Although van Ravesteyn was by no means the inferior of van Mierevelt artistically, he has never enjoyed the latter’s international reputation. The Hague-based portrait painter Adriaen Hanneman (c.1603 – 1671) married Jan’s daughter Maria in 1640; strangely Hanneman received his own training from Jan’s brother Anthonie (1580 – 1669), rather than his father-in-law.[5] They would latterly become next door neighbours on the Nobelstraat in The Hague.
[1] Remonstrants, also known as Arminianists, were liberal Protestants who had split from the Dutch Reformed Church in the early 17th century. They were against the strict proponents of Calvinism and maintained that secular authorities have the right to interfere in theological disputes to preserve peace. Their political opponents, led by Prince Maurits, were known as Counter-Remonstrants.
[2] P. Molhuysen and P. Blok, New Dutch biographical dictionary, Vol. 9, Leiden 1933, pp. 384 – 389.
[4] O. Blom, Young Rembrandt: A Biography, New York 2020.
[5] R.E.O. Ekkart, “Jan (Anthonisz.) van Ravesteyn” from Grove Art Online, 2003. Accessed 14/11/2022: https://doi-org.lonlib.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T070929