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A Portrait by Jacob Esselens by Wolfgang Stechow - 3 ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM OBERLIN COLLEGE FALL 1963 The covet design by Forbes Whiteside is based upon his design for the Allen Memorial Art Museum monogram. ALLEN MEMORIAL ART MUSEUM BULLETIN VOLUME XXI, NUMBER 1 FALL 1963 Contents A Portrait by Jacob Esselens by Wolfgang Stechow - 3 Cezanne and a Pine Tree by Ellen H. Johnson - - - - 11 Viaduct at I'Estaque: A Footnote by Ellen H. Johnson 25 Christina of Denmark by Michael Coxie by Patricia Rose ----- 29 Nils Gosta Sandblad 52 Notes Baldwin Lecture Series 1963-64 53 Oberlin Archaeological Society - - - - - 53 Fall and Winter Exhibitions - - - - - 53 Friends of Art Film Series ----- 54 Loans to Museums and Institutions - - - - - 55 Friends of the Museum - - - - - - 57 Printed three times a year by the Department of Art of Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio. $6.00 a year, this issue $2.00; mailed free to members of the Oberlin Friends of Art. 1. Jacob Esselens, Portrait of a Lady Oberlin A Portrait by Jacob Esselens Again and again in the course of a comprehensive view of Dutch painting of the seventeenth century, one is struck by the phenomenon of a master of secondary rank surpassing his ordinary level of achieve­ ment and approaching that of the elect few. The circumstances in which this occurs vary: a special meeting of mind between teacher and pupil, the discovery of unsuspected developments in other artistic centers of the land, a journey abroad, a theme or a sitter holding a particular personal appeal to the painter — all these may accomplish it. No collection known to this writer can boast of more happv surprises of this kind than that of one of the great connoisseurs of our time, Mr. F. Lugt in Paris. The Allen Memorial Art Museum, already the owner of at least one such exceptional picture, Job Berckhevde's Bakery Shop,1 has just acquired another, a small portrait of a lady (fig. I).2 It is a distinguished little work in which sobrietv and elegance blend in perfect harmony. The fashionable black dress and scarf, the necklace and earrings, the demonstratively presented watch, the refined gesture of the left hand, the rich drapery of the orange-brown curtain foil are average ingredients of portraiture around 1670 all over Europe, but the rhythm with which these elements are interlaced is of a rare perfection, both in their linear and coloristic order, and the brushstroke is neither over-meticulous nor sloppy. Above all, it is remarkable that the sitter does not seem to pose for all this; with her charmingly innocent, conspicuously Dutch features, her natural restraint, her unassuming youthfulness she dignifies what could otherwise easily be no more than a modish display, and makes it all her own in an almost touching synthesis of naivete and social ease. But there is nothing dilettante about the means with which the painter has conveyed this human situation to us. The picture bears the full signature of Jacob Esselens, who was born in Amsterdam in 1626 or 1628 and was buried there on January 15, 1 W. Stechow, "Job Berckhevde's 'Bakery Shop'," AMAM Bulletin, XV, 1958, p. 90 ff. 2 Ace. no. 62.40. On panel, 10% by 8]/2 inches. Signed, lower left: "J. Esselens." From a Swiss private collection and Coll. F. Mont, New York. 1687.3 He was one of the few well-to-do Dutch painters of the seven­ teenth century but he did not earn his fortune with the works of his brush. Called a merchant in documents of the seventies and eighties, he was best known as a silk dealer and employer of velvet weavers in Amsterdam; he travelled a good deal in France, England and Scotland, and his pictorial output seems to have been rather small — even though we may assume that some of his genuine signatures were later removed from his paintings in order to make them salable as works of better known masters. The majority of his extant paintings are landscapes of great diversity. Some are wooded or rocky scenes, often with lakes and streams, with mythological figures or contemporary fishing or hunt­ ing parties, in the style of painters of foreign scenes representing various trends;4 there are occasional English vistas'' and marines." Less protean, and more easily recognized as works of one and the same hand, are his views of Dutch beaches, seen either close by or from a more distant vant­ age point, some of them of very high quality (fig. 7). Drawings by Esselens show an even more bewildering variety, ranging all the way from utterly classicistic, almost Carracci-like landscapes7 to realistic studies of the fishermen and gentlefolk that populate his painted "beach- scapes".8 3 On Esselens see: A. von Wurzbach, Niederlandisches Kiinstler-Lexikon, Vienna- Leipzig, 1906, I, p. 496; K. Lilienfeld in Thieme-Becker's Kiinstlerlexikon, XI, 1915, p. 43; A. Bredius, "Das Nachlass-Inventar von Jacob Esselens," Kiinstler- Inventare, II {Quellenstudien zur hollandischen Kitnstgeschichte, VI), The Hague, 1916, p. 549 ff.; idem, Kiinstler-lnventare, VII, p. 58; idem, "Drie land- schappen van Jacob Esselens," Ond Holland, XLVII, 1930, p. 277 ff.; S. J. Gudlaugsson, "Een figuurstudie van Jacob Esselens te Besaneon," Oud Holland, LXVI, 1951, p. 62 f.; P. H. Hulton, "Drawings of England in the Seventeenth Centurv bv Willem Schellinks, Jacob Esselens and Lambert Doomer," Walpole Society, XXXV, 1954-56, (published in 1959), 2 vols. (Atlas van der Hem, National Library, Vienna). 4 A picture in Braunschweig (no. 198), sometimes said to recall Poelenburgh, is really reminiscent of the late phase of classicistic landscape painting in Holland, and the Forest Scene in Amsterdam (no. 905 c) was in fact once attributed to Glauber. Before the Scottish Landscape in the Brediushuis at The Hague (no. 46) one thinks of Everdingen. All three pictures are signed. 5 In addition to the drawings in the Atlas van der Hem (see note 3) cf. the signed View of Hampton Court, exhibited at the Burlington Fine Arts Club, Winter 1927-28, and the View of Dover in the Bruce S. Ingram Collection (Exhibi­ tion at Colnaghi's, London, March 1938, no. 72). 6 Museum in Raleigh, N.C., cat. 1956, no. 47 (not signed but probably correctly attributed, see also the Lake Scene in Oxford, Asbmolean Museum, cat. 1951, no. 144). A winter landscape, mentioned in a sale at Amsterdam, April 19, 1735, no. 47 (see Thieme-Becker), remains to be rediscovered. 7 Several examples in Brussels, Coll. de Grez (no. 1243 is fully signed). 8 For instance, Hamburg, no. 21922, and Gudlaugsson, op. cit. UJ Esselens seems to have been no less eclectic in his rare portraits. I am acquainted with but four fullv authenticated ones, including ours. A pair representing husband and wife is known today from reproductions only (figs. 2 and 3);" while the man is of a somewhat more outgoing type — one can certainly detect amiability and a fine sense of humor here — the woman seems to be nearer in interpretation to the Oberlin ladv, and certainly very close in style. It is possible that if the Oberlin picture were not signed bv Esselens it would have been attributed, in spite of its unusually small size, to Nicolaes Maes — and that among the portraits attributed to Maes there may be hidden some actually done bv Esselens. This, of course, is not the Maes of the Rembrandtesque period but of the years around 1670-80, just before and after his final removal from Dordrecht to Amsterdam, when he had already become a portrait painter of the more fashionable type in which French and Flemish elements vie with the sturdier Dutch core. In its general stylistic and technical features the Oberlin portrait corresponds rather closely to this group of works by Maes (fig. 4).10 But upon closer inspection its most personal properties differ from those of Maes's portraits significantly enough to establish criteria for distinguishing between the works of the two artists. Although Maes's most superficially elegant likenesses belong to his last period (ca. 1680- 93), even those of the time around 1670-80 have a greater tendency to­ ward a certain grandiloquence, or in any case — including the case of the extraordinarily sensitive picture here illustrated — toward a more emphatic contact between the sitter and the onlooker. Esselens' greater- restraint in this respect can hardly be overlooked. The signed female portrait by Esselens in the possession of Mr. Nystad in The Hague (fig. 5)n is of a rather different type. A full- 9 A. Bredius, Kiinstler-lnventare, II, p. 555 (see note 3); on panel, 11 by 9 inches, sale Ramsay and Rangabe, Berlin (Lepke), Feb. 7, 1911, nos. 73-74, with illus­ trations, from which ours were taken through the courtesy of the Princeton Department of Art and Archaeology (Piatt Collection). The female portrait is signed. 10 I owe the photograph of this outstanding work of 1679 to Dr. Jan Bialostocki in Warsaw. See C. Hofstede de Groot, Catalogue Raisonne. VI, London, 1916, p. 579, no. 456, and Jan Bialostocki and Michael Walicki, Europaische Malerei in Polnischen Sammlungen, 1300-1800, Warsaw, 1957, pi. 281 and p. 537. — Another artist whose few portraits come to mind before the Oberlin portrait is Jan van Noordt; see A. Staring, "Weinig bekende portrettisten, III: Joannes van Noordt," Kunsthistorische Verkenningen, The Hague, 1948, p. 47 ff. (some of these portraits had been attributed to Maes), and A. Pigler, "Gruppenbild- nisse mit historisch verkleideten Figuren und ein Hauptwcrk des Joannes van Noordt," Acta Historiae Artium, II, 1955, p. 169 ff. II On canvas, 24 by 19Vi inches. I am indebted to Mr. Nystad for the photograph.
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