Paintings Worth Looking At

In which the portrait of the father is recycled for the son. - - - These two pictures are oddly similar. As usual, that’s no coincidence.  Last time on the Hamey Channel, we discussed a big-name painter, Cornelius Johnson. Today, we’ll focus on a small name: Matthew Snelling, a little-known miniaturist.  Snelling is remembered for his portrait of Hamey and not much else. (The record of the picture cites the artist as “Matthew (?) Snelling,” granting him even less dignity.) “Baldvinus Hamey M.D.”, shown on the left, captures the good doctor at age 74, pictured with those timeless hallmarks of the medical profession: a dashing cap, several gigantic books, and the marble busts of his favorite ancient authors, which he strokes lovingly like a household pet. 

This is a cautionary tale. Not on my part, thankfully (at least not yet), but on the danger of leaping to conclusions.   The Baldwin Hamey portraits are an incredibly convoluted story involving at least five separate paintings (some lost, some found), which may or may not actually depict the same man and/or his extremely similar son. In fact, the prospect of untangling this whole thing is so spectacularly complex that it hasn’t been done yet. But let’s give it a shot anyway. The portrait known as Baldwin Hamey, Senior (on the right), is an astoundingly high-quality painting. It stands head and shoulders above standard formulaic portraiture of the era (pun not intended). It’s so good for its time, in fact, that I initially wondered if it had been mislabeled on ArtUK, but it’s credibly inscribed as 1633 and bears the Hamey family coat of arms. Its artistic authorship is a tantalizing, compelling mystery.