Abstract
Bartholomeus van der Helst was a leading portrait painter in the Northern Netherlands in the 17th century. This monograph reconstructs his career and his circle of patrons based on the surviving works and documents. Van der Helst was born in Haarlem around 1613. In the early 1630s he moved to
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Amsterdam, where he was apprenticed to portrait painter Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy. In 1636, he married Anna du Pire, of a prosperous family from the Southern Netherlands. Through his marriage, Van der Helst found himself part of the network of Southern Netherlandish origins in particular the Walloon community. His first commission was through these contacts: his earliest known painting is a portrait of the governors of the Walloon orphanage in 1637. Some years later, he - along with the principal portrait painters in Amsterdam of the time, including Rembrandt van Rijn - was commissioned to paint one of the civic guard portraits for the crossbowmen’s hall, Kloveniersdoelen. This was his breakthrough as a portrait painter into the world of Amsterdam’s wealthy elite. His first patrons, members of the Bicker family, brought him into contact with other leading Amsterdam families, such as the Huydecopers, Trips and De Geers. His most important commission came following the Treaty of Munster, signed in 1648. This group portrait of Cornelis Jansz Witsen’s company, the ‘Civic Guard Banquet’, was regarded until the 19th century as one of the masterpieces of 17th-century art. Van der Helst signed most of his works with his name in full together with the date. Paintings are known from almost every year of his working life, which enables us to trace how his style developed. Apart from one history painting and a city view, these are all portraits: single subjects, family portraits and group portraits of governors or civic guardsmen. Van der Helst’s oeuvre exhibits a consistent quality that only tailed off as his career came to an end. While at the outset, the influence of Pickenoy is visible, in the 1640s Van der Helst seems to have found his own form: well modelled portraits painted with barely visible brushstrokes. In the middle of the century his work became more colourful and his subjects adopted fashionably elegant poses and movement. In his composition of single portraits he was not at first especially innovative and followed the Amsterdam tradition. In his later work his style acquired a monumental quality and a greater freedom. It was in the composition of his group portraits that Van der Helst showed his ability to innovate. Van der Helst’s work was emulated by portrait painters in Amsterdam and abroad, particularly his solutions for group portraits. His principal follower and his only known pupil was his son Lodewijk (1642-after 1682), whose surviving oeuvre consists mainly of portraits.
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