The Pastel Pair (Theodoor Bohres)

In which an investigation starts with folk art, visits the Netherlands, and ends up back at folk art.

I'll admit, I got lucky with this one.

I was looking on a stock photo website for “portrait painting” (as one does) and, several dozen pages into the mixed results, I stumbled upon this lovely lady. 

Her slightly primitive rendering and sincere charm reminded me of American folk art pastel portraits, an area I’ve spent quite some time researching. I wondered if she might be connected to the works of New England itinerant artists, such as Micah Williams or James Martin. She’s not an exact match, but there’s a vague likeness in the direct eye contact, the soft flat shading of the skin, and the straightforward, almost confrontational, framing of the portrait subject.

There are significant differences, though. For a reason - as it turns out, she’s not from America. She’s actually Dutch! She’s listed as “a painting of a woman in a black dress,” uploaded onto Unsplash by the “Europeana” account (7,174 views, and only 44 downloads; ouch!) There’s a handy link to her listing on the Europeana site, presenting her name: “Henriëtta Arnoldina Lucia Maria van Harinxma Thoe Heegh.” For the sake of this article, we’ll just call her Henrietta. 

Her information, in full, reads as follows (via Google Translate): 

Pastel portrait of Henriëtta Arnoldina Lucia Maria van Harinxma Thoe Heegh (1774-1861). The subject is seated and turned to the left. Her hair is up and curled at the front. She wears a dark blue dress with short puff sleeves and a white, lace and sleeveless overdress with a high collar. She wears a pearl necklace and long earrings. She married Ernestus Judocus Rudolphus van Grotenhuis (1775-1847) in 1795, whose
portrait is the counterpart to this work. Loan Brantsen from the Zyp Foundation.

That tells us almost nothing we couldn’t see for ourselves, aside from her lengthy name. But now we know she had a matching husband portrait, complete with an equally cumbersome name (we’ll just call him Ernestus). Frustratingly, Europeana’s website did not link him from Henrietta’s page, but he didn’t escape custody for long. Here he is. 

Ernestus is also oddly reminiscent of the folk art styles of Williams and Martin. Not directly, but there’s just something about it. Maybe it’s the hair wisps and the judgmental stares.

Here’s Ernestus again, in higher quality. Like Henrietta, his portrait displays a combination of elegantly refined techniques, such as the finely detailed strokes for his hair) and simple, straightforward representation of the sitter’s likeness. His hair seems to have gone prematurely gray, which tells us more about his life than his exceptionally vague informational paragraph. The text reads: 

Pastel portrait of Ernestus Judocus Rudolphus van Grotenhuis (1775-1847). The sitter is depicted sitting and turned to a straight position. He has gray hair and wears a dark blue coat with a double row of gold buttons and underneath a white shirt with a high, white plate and tour de cou and plastron. In 1795 he married Henriëtta Arnoldina Lucia Maria van Harinxma Thoe Heegh (1774-1861), whose portrait is the counterpart to this work. Loan Brantsen from the Zyp Foundation.

So, all we know about him is that he got married and wore a coat. 

I did try my hand at biographical research on Henrietta and Ernestus, and I have to admit, I wasn’t able to gather anything meaningful. Various Netherlandish websites provide extensive genealogical research resources, but I have the real disadvantage of not speaking Dutch. Translation tools can only take you so far. Anyone with a better grasp of it is more than welcome to give it a try. At the very least, it would be nice to know something about what either of them did with their lives. (One website said they had 2 children. Another site said 11! Jury’s still out.) We do know that they were married in 1795, when they were only about 20 years of age. So, considering Ernestus’s graying hair, this portrait appears to have been been painted just a bit later (unless he had the worst teenage job imaginable.) It’s worth mentioning that someone with a better grasp of women’s fashion could probably use Henrietta’s lovely dress to pin down a proper date for this picture. I did put her through a Yandex recognition search, and it came back with this French portrait and this Dutch portrait, so that’s something.

It’s time to figure out the artist. Let’s see them side by side first, just for good measure.

On to the research. For pastels, one of the best online resources is Neal Jeffares’s “Dictionary of pastellists,” which has individual mini-catalog pages for most pre-1800 artists of note. I’ve used it extensively for my folk art research, and I took a similarly straightforward approach here. I opened the “Artists” page, searched for “Netherlands,” and clicked on all the options that came up on the first pass — 24 in total (though there are, of course, many more than that!) One of the very first (result number three) was Theodoor Bohres. 

Here’s Bohres’s work, via the Dictionary of Pastellists page…

That seems awfully familiar.

Let’s take another look at the pair alongside the closest comparative examples from Jeffares — the portraits of Frans and Jan de Neree. Henrietta and Ernestus have the very same facial expressive characteristics seen in Bohres’s work. Compare on the man — the pursed lips in that wry expression, the slightly quirked eyebrows, the wisps of hair that lay on the forehead. And on the woman — that Mona Lisa smile, wise and knowing, both solemn and mischievous, as if she’s just been told a secret she won’t share with the viewer. 

I believe, most of the time, the characterization of the portrait’s face is the most distinctive artistic trademark of all. That aspect can be hard to verbally describe, but once you spot it, it’s unmistakable. On the American folk art side, for example, James Martin’s pastels all have a scowly and dissatisfied look, as opposed to Micah William’s solemnly calm subjects. This, combined with Martin’s distinctive multi-color backgrounds, makes it possible to pick out a misattribution between the two, such as this grumpy-looking lady in white (via MutualArt), labeled a Williams, but probably a Martin.

Returning to Dutch art, we can see that Henrietta and Ernestus’s faces are also a match for another set of Bohres examples: the Tonkes family (husband, wife, child.) The sidelong glance, the arched brows, that distinctive smirk — Bohres curves the mouth, shapes the nose, and shades the eyes in a very particular way. There are many obvious technical parallels to make, in terms of how the artist draws the face, but what the artist draws for the face is just as crucial. This might sound obvious, but when evaluating a piece, it’s important to ask “would they have done this picture this way?” And, seemingly, Bohres would.

Artists also tend to be very consistent with their sense of face/head shape. Bohres favors pointy chins on women and rounded chins on men. The cheeks are not overly full, but not gaunt, either; they tend to be smooth, and the jaw and chin handled delicately. The ears usually stick out in his treatment of a 3/4 face view. The hair cascades over the forehead, visible past the side of the eye socket. The skull and hair, in the back, are placed mostly above the ear. The eyes are rounded in shape, outlined at the upper lid but not the lower, almost marble-like in his shiny shading of the iris.

But, just a few comparisons wasn’t enough. I spent some time searching, and painstakingly dug up about 40 of Bohres’s pastels, one at a time. Then, after wasting several hours, I discovered that the RKD (Netherlands Institute for Art History) has a collection of 250+ Bohres works! Needless to say, the man was inspirationally prolific, and I had seen enough.

The portraits all have quite a few stylistic and technical traits in common. There are so many, in fact, that I found it overwhelming to try to compare them all. So let’s stick with one more set of examples shown in the Dictionary of Pastellists - Wolter Coops and his wife Harmina Coops-Hesselink. These have deteriorated with time, as pastels often do, and no longer display the same crisp, vivid contrast that’s noticeable on so many of the Bohres portraits. Correspondingly, they both have much less contrast than average, as do ours. And, once again, the similarities are clearly evident. Unavoidably, strikingly obvious. (I mean that in a complimentary way. Stylistic consistency makes the monumental task of attribution just a bit less taxing.)

With an eye towards further research, I located multiple articles written about Bohres (all written in Dutch, of course) and put those through the translator. Here’s some info, from an article about Bohres and his work, by Jochem Kroes:

“…in [a] database at the RKD Dutch Institute for Art History, I searched for portrait painters from the early nineteenth century who had worked in the province of Groningen, among other places. There I found names like Berend Kunst (1794-1881), Wessel Lubbers (1755-1834) and Theodorus Bohres (circa 1780-after 1836). The best known is Kunst, who left behind more than 550 pastel portraits, while almost a hundred portraits by Lubbers are known.

However, based on stylistic characteristics, Theodorus Bohres is the most likely painter of these portraits. Unfortunately, little is known about him. He possibly came from the (south)east of the country or from Germany and settled in the city of Groningen in 1815. He continued to live and work there throughout the second decade of the nineteenth century. In 1820 he moved to Zutphen and started painting portraits of residents of the Gelderland Achterhoek. He also worked in the eastern River area, the east of Brabant and the north of Limburg. In the 1830s he made several portraits of people from Venlo and the surrounding area. His last portrait dates from 1836 and he probably died shortly afterwards. A total of about 230 portraits by him are known.”

For the sake of due diligence, with that article in mind, I had a look through the works of Berend Kunst and Wessel Lubbers (below.) They’re visibly similar to that very same style, but I’m still mostly confident in my attribution to Theodoor Bohres, or else I wouldn't have gone to the trouble to write this post. Fingers crossed that I'm right -- but these things always have a margin of error.

In my estimation, Lubbers’ portraits have a particularly sculptural rendered quality that isn’t as apparent in the work of Bohres. Kunst’s works have the opposite problem; they feel a bit too flat in the facial shading to realistically match Henrietta and Ernestus. Additionally, Kunst’s sitters don’t always make eye contact with the viewer, and the face vs. body proportion and scale feels very different. Nevertheless, the similarities are clear. And, given my folk art research, I’m no stranger to stylistic overlap. It’s not uncommon to lose track of the different artistic hands while studying hundreds of lookalike portraits of well-dressed couples and winsome children — and those are plentiful on both sides of the ocean.

Speaking of: in the research process, I learned something particularly important about Bohres. He was an itinerant painter, just like the American folk artists I’d been comparing him to. What are the odds? Higher than you'd think. Despite the impossible distance, their methods and lifestyles are remarkably similar, illustrating the fascinating parallels between geographically separate societies. Consider, from the relevant article, by Joep Haffmans (also clumsily translated by yours truly, with machine assistance): 

“Bohres was an itinerant portrait painter. His method of working must have meant that he traveled from place to place on foot or by stagecoach, carrying with him some elementary attributes, such as drawing paper and colored chalk. Sometimes through announcements in newspapers, but usually through word of mouth, he announced where he was taking a seat. And then his clients were invited, of whom he then created a flattering, yet accurate portrait. An example of an advertisement can be read in the Groninger Courant of February 4, 1820. It shows that making a pastel portrait cost eight guilders. That was no giveaway, at a time when a worker's wages usually amounted to less than a guilder per day.” 

Here’s that February 4, 1820 newspaper: “NB. The Portrait Painter THEODORUS BOHRES announces to the honored audience that he is now back in Groningen and will be there for some time. He paints portraits in Crayon (Life Size) for 8 Guilders, and in Oil Paint pro rata. Although the price is small, he flatters himself that his work of art can withstand the test, and accepts it for good, or no charge. - This person is staying at the Kastelein N. de Mulder, innkeeper in the Heere-straat, in the Wapen van Amsterdam, lett U. no. 2.”

Turns out, nothing's really changed. The ad even comes with a "satisfaction or your money back" guarantee. This wouldn’t be out of place on Craigslist or in the local classified pages. And the result of Bohres’s enterprising spirit is a veritable yearbook of Dutch citizens, looking back at us out of their frames for centuries to come. 

Presumably, they were satisfied, no money back required.