The Man in the Void (Jacob Delff the Younger)
In which a mysterious floating head is reattached to a Dutch nobleman, and a grandson copies his grandfather to impersonate him postmortem.
This humble yet striking picture originally turned up on a stock photo website, uploaded — in the infinite wisdom of automatic titling — as “Man In Black Jacket Holding White Plastic Tube.”
It’s a mystery where a gentleman from 1648 in the Netherlands might have got hold of plastic.
So I stashed it in my digital notes, with the aforementioned label. There is something a bit off: it’s remarkably good. Despite the gap in centuries, the man feels relatable. He tiredly and wistfully gazes out of his frame, choked by his stifling starched ruff. (Some sitters wear the ruff. For other sitters, the ruff wears them.) Fashion aside, it’s clearly a picture of great quality. The execution is intricate, the brushwork precise, the fabric crisply and delicately rendered. The man’s ruddy skin tones are impressively vivid, and there’s life in his eyes. It might be an anonymous painting of a nameless man by an unknown artist, but it has a surprising amount of charisma.
It stuck with me. I went back to it. I kept looking. I found it: “Portrait of a Man.” (Helpful.) Thankfully, there’s more information available — enough to identify it, maybe. It seemed worth a try.
The Rijksmuseum website lists its inscriptions: “date, centre left: A.º 1619 / inscription, centre left: Ætatis 54.” This information places the sitter at 54 years of age in 1619. But in the Technical Notes section, it says: “Dendrochronology has shown… the panel could have been ready for use by 1642, but a date in or after 1648 is more likely.” So, a painting dated 1619, which could not have been made before 1642? Mistakes can happen, but that’s quite a gap. As the Rijksmuseum rightly points out, it’s almost certainly a copy. In addition to the disparity in dates, the text mentions its “rather sketchy execution” as proof. (I’m inclined to judge it a bit more generously.) They go on to say there is no known original, but it bears a similarity to the work of Cornelis van der Voort.
We’ll see.
There are other oddities to reconcile. The bottom edge of the painting shows a cut-off item, something gold and glossy, rendered in high detail but inexplicably severed halfway through. What to make of this? The technical report points out, credibly, that “the panel has retained its original dimensions.” So much of the rest of the painting is a dark void that showcases and smothers the sitters’ face. Why bother to include that detail at the edge at all?
This had to be a copy of something interesting, I figured. And off I went.
Plumbing the depths of the internet via image recognition search is a handy tool for the modern art historian, but it has to be used with discretion. An algorithm may know that pictures are similar, but it can’t tell you why they’re similar, and on those grounds, it can be worse than useless. I prefer to use it as a simple guidance tool, narrowing down the search results from the thousands to the hundreds. This time, it pointed me in a helpful direction: this painting of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, “second founding father of the Netherlands.”
There had to be a connection! Look at the ears, I reasoned. The manner of painting them seems so similar. And the eyelids look so very much alike. Even the beard and mustache are executed with those short, furry brushstrokes that lend a soft plush look to the sitter’s facial hair. But, I realized, it couldn’t be the same sitter. The nose is drastically different, among other failures in likeness. Too bad. It would’ve been a win to track down a picture of such an iconic Dutch statesman — but it was not to be.
And yet, the similarity in style was far too close to ignore. So, who painted good old Oldenbarnevelt?
I soon found out that this image is associated with Michiel Janszoon van Mierevelt, though that’s not to say he painted it himself. A renowned figure of the Dutch Golden Age, Mierevelt was known for both his own portraiture skills and his highly efficient workshop, which cranked out multiple different copies of the Oldenbarnevelt painting like an assembly line. (I’m not being unduly harsh: Wikipedia itself says “the many commissions entrusted to [Mierevelt] necessitated the employment of numerous assistants, by whom hundreds of portraits were turned out in factory fashion”!) The precise copy of Oldenbarnevelt that popped up in my search was featured on a book cover, in which the contrast and saturation appear to have been turned up. I wasn’t able to backtrack to the exact original, but I reasoned that, like so many others, that one had to be “Workshop of van Mierevelt.” It’s not the precise answer I was hoping for, but it’s progress.
Frustratedly, I returned to Man in the Void — and had a new breakthrough. Further image recognition-based searching, now with Mierevelt’s name attached, pulled back the curtain once and for all. The mysterious gentleman is….
…Nicolaes Gael! (Whomever he is.)
Or so we’re told. He’s a vexingly elusive figure who did not respond cooperatively to my research attempts. He has a family coat-of-arms, as per the Christie’s listing of this painting, and was clearly a Dutch man of nobility and means, but as far as I was able to discern, he didn’t end up on the historical record for anything in particular. This one is said to be a pair with another painting, sold via Christie’s the prior year, “Portrait of a Lady” (Maria Mollen), dated 1615 — four years before Gael, and with seemingly no real connection. The provenance was equally unhelpful. The list starts out at one “Dorothea Christina Minette Roëll van Benthem van den Bergh (1875-1956), Amsterdam,” whose abundance of names is matched only by the absence of information.
The proof is unmistakable. Even beyond the clear resemblance, the Gael painting says “inscribed, dated and signed 'Ætatis 54 / A. 1619. / M: Miereveld. / Fecit' (centre left),” just like our mysterious man. Let’s compare again:
It’s a perfect match. The cut-off edge of the painting now makes sense, too. That mysterious half-severed object is his golden belt. (In fact, the copy appears to have been executed with an even greater command of shiny reflective materials than the original.) Note that the left hand holding the glove has been omitted, for some reason, but the right sleeve lines up. I think it’s reasonable to speculate that the rest of the painting may lie obscured beneath the centuries of age and varnish — but for now, the dark void remains.
So, the Mierevelt connection was spot on. We have an answer. There’s just one problem - his lifespan: “1 May 1566 – 27 June 1641.”
Mierevelt’s mastery of his craft is obvious, but posthumous productivity seems like a lot to ask.
That puts it in the hands of Mierevelt’s workshop instead. That makes sense. He was known for his highly productive and well-staffed studio, after all. It’s perfectly reasonable that one of his successors might’ve copied his pictures in order to fully master his style, technique, and visual sensibilities. So, how many apprentices did he have, anyway? How hard could it be to narrow it down and make a stylistic match? Off to Wikipedia again…
“Many of his pupils and assistants rose to fame. The most gifted of them were Paulus Moreelse, Jan Antonisz. van Ravesteyn, Daniel Mijtens, Anthonie Palamedesz., Johan van Nes, and Hendrick Cornelisz. van Vliet. His sons Pieter (1596–1623) and Jan (died 1633), and his son-in-law Jacob Delff, probably painted many of the pictures which go under his name.”
Excellent.
Pieter and Jan can be safely discarded, given their death dates. That leaves everybody else. I’ll omit the grisly details of the process, but I went through and did a brute-force search of the works of all of Mierevelt’s most well-known apprentices, studying a broad range of their portraits, counting them in or out, and eventually narrowing the options to a small handful.
Isn’t it always the last one on the list?
Mierevelt’s own relative, Jacob Delff, is by far the likeliest candidate on stylistic grounds, as well as contextual clues. Painting under Mierevelt’s name, he would have had special incentive to ensure his work could pass as the legitimate article. But there’s a small further twist: the Jacob Delff who was probably responsible for this work (and many others) is the Younger, his grandson, who inherited his workshop and was Mierevelt’s named heir and chosen successor. There was a Jacob Delff Senior, but he did not reach the same levels of skill, repute, and significance. Very likely it’s simply a Wikipedia error naming Jacob Delff as his son-in-law rather than grandson.
Consider the following scholarship (courtesy of Lawrence Steigrad Fine Arts): “Jacob Willemsz. Delff began his training in the workshop of his maternal grandfather, the renowned portraitist Michiel van Mierevelt. ... Following the deaths of Mierevelt’s sons Pieter and Jan, who were also employed in the workshop, his grandson Jacob was designated as his successor. Several works exist that are signed by both Mierevelt and Delff the Younger, as well as examples signed solely by Delff prior to his grandfather’s death in 1641. This would have constituted a break from tradition as well as a sign of great confidence in the young painter’s abilities. After Mierevelt’s death, Delff took charge, completing unfinished commissions and receiving new orders. Initially the conservative style of his grandfather was maintained, one which emphasized the reserved dignity of his patrician clientele."
The Web Gallery of Art summarizes it more concisely: "After the death of Miereveld in 1641, the young Delff took over and led the prosperous workshop which produced many portraits in the style of Miereveld." The British Museum confirms this: "Their son Jacob became a painter and inherited his grandfather's studio in 1641."
Delff was known to copy Mierevelt’s portraits with great accuracy yet clear stylistic distinction, infusing the pictures with his own sensibilities. Compare the following paintings of Dutch lawyer and statesman Hugo Grotius: 1631 Mierevelt original / 1642 Delff copy, the latter credibly attributed to one Jacob Willemsz. Delff II by Dutch expert Jasper Hillegers:
And now, back to Nicolaes I and Nicolaes II:
Case closed.
I did write to the Rijksmuseum about this, but have not yet heard back. Presumably, contacting an expert such as Hillegers would be the way to proceed from there. There’s no guarantee that I’m entirely correct — it’s a long shot, but it could be an artist other than Delff. But there’s no mistaking that that’s the very same picture of the mysterious Nicolaes Gael.
As one last note, it’s worth mentioning why I was hunting stock photos. I was trying to find an interesting portrait to fill up the frame of a 3D model of a painting, which I then planned to use in a digital render of my very own.
Art imitates art, or something.
