Jan Lievens

Born Leiden, 24 Oct 1607; died Amsterdam, 4 June 1674.

Dutch painter, draughtsman and printmaker. His work has often suffered by comparison with that of Rembrandt, with whom he was closely associated from 1625 to 1631. Yet Lievens’s early work is equal to that of Rembrandt, although in later years he turned more towards a somewhat facile rendering of the international Baroque style favoured by his noble patrons, thus never fully realizing his early promise. Nonetheless, he became a renowned portrait painter and draughtsman, and his drawings include some of the finest examples of 17th-century Dutch portraiture in the medium.

1. Leiden, 1607–31.

He was, the son of Lieven Hendricxz. [De Rechte] (bur Leiden, 8 May 1612), an embroiderer, hatmaker and hatseller in Leiden, and his wife, Machteld Jansdr. van Noortsant (bur Leiden, 6 March 1622). According to Orlers, at the age of eight Jan became a pupil of the Leiden painter Joris van Schooten (c. 1587–c. 1653) and c. 1617–19 studied in Amsterdam with the history painter Pieter Lastman. The latter’s influence is evident in Lievens’s earliest known works, c. 1625. Lievens returned to Leiden and settled there as an independent master. Orlers recorded that Lievens’s work after his return (e.g. a portrait of his mother, 1621; untraced) won him general admiration. From 1625 to 1631 Lievens worked closely with his fellow townsman Rembrandt van rijn, possibly sharing a studio with him. The rivalry between the two young painters is revealed in their earliest works, which show mutual borrowings of composition and subject. The two used such a similar painting technique that it is extremely difficult to ascribe their unsigned works of this period correctly. Rembrandt began his training c. 1620, much later than Lievens, who therefore had the initial advantage. From 1628, however, Rembrandt overtook Lievens. In these first Leiden years, Lievens and Rembrandt repeatedly painted portraits of each other.

Apart from Lastman, the clearest influence on Lievens’s earliest paintings was the work produced by the Utrecht Caravaggisti, particularly Gerrit van Honthorst. This is evident in Lievens’s preference at that time (one shared by Rembrandt) for half-length figures and for strong chiaroscuro effects from artificial light sources (e.g. the Allegory of Smell, Warsaw, N. Mus.). Around 1625 both Lievens and Rembrandt made their first prints, which were published by the Haarlem publisher Jan Pietersz. Berendrecht.

After 1628 Lievens’s technique changed. His use of colours tended to be more monochromatic, moving away from Lastman’s early influence, with an increasing use of impasto to define form, as in the grisaille oil sketch of Samson and Delilah (c. 1628; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). In the same year Lievens began to achieve recognition from outside Leiden and supplied various paintings to Stadholder Frederick Henry and his wife Amalia van Solms, including The Oriental (Potsdam, Bildergal.) and another version, in oil on canvas, of Samson and Delilah (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). Orlers said that Lievens also executed a life-size painting of a Man Reading by a Fire (untraced), which won him such praise that the Stadholder ordered the picture to be bought for the English ambassador Sir Robert Kerr, 1st Earl of Ancram (1578–1654), who, in turn, gave it to Charles I of England.

Constantijn Huygens the elder, the Stadholder’s secretary, was the first to write about the duo of Lievens and Rembrandt. In his autobiography, written between 1629 and 1631, Huygens praised the two young painters highly and compared their talents. He wrote that Lievens was better than Rembrandt because his magnificent invention and daring subjects and designs were greater, while Rembrandt, in his view, exceeded Lievens in precision and vitality of emotions. Huygens also praised Lievens for his strength of mind and very mature, sharp and profound sense of judgement. The portrait of himself (Douai, Mus. Mun.; on loan Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) that Huygens commissioned from Lievens and described in his autobiography was probably executed during the winter of 1629–30.

In his last two years in Leiden, Lievens executed a number of works that can be regarded as the highpoints of his oeuvre, including three from 1631: Job on the Dung-hill (Ottawa, N.G.), the Raising of Lazarus (Brighton, A.G. & Mus.) and Eli and Samuel (Malibu, CA, Getty Mus.). From 1628 the collaboration with Rembrandt became less close, and in late 1631 Rembrandt moved to Amsterdam.

2. England and Amsterdam, 1632–43.

Although Orlers claimed that Lievens went to England in 1631, a document signed by Lievens in Leiden on 2 February 1632 suggests that he left Leiden just after that date. He remained in England until 1635, during which time it seems that he was less productive than in Leiden; scarcely any dated works are known from his English period. From a poem written by Huygens in 1633, it is known that Lievens painted portraits of members of the English royal family and court; however, none has survived. In London, Lievens met Anthony van Dyck, who painted his portrait (untraced; known only through the engraving by Lucas Vorsterman), for van Dyck’s Iconography (c. 1632–44). During this time Lievens’s style was influenced by van Dyck, and his modified use of colour suggests he was able to study Italian paintings in English collections.

In 1635 Lievens was registered as a member of the Guild of St Luke in Antwerp. There he eliminated the last remnants of his Leiden style from his work and adopted completely the Flemish Baroque style of van Dyck and Rubens, in paintings such as his large altarpiece (in situ) of the Holy Family with the Young Baptist for the Jesuit church of S Carlo Borromeo in Antwerp. On 1 May 1636 Lievens took on Hans van den Wijngaard (1614–79) as his pupil. Jan Davidsz. de Heem and Adriaen Brouwer, both painters active in Antwerp, were involved in the contract, and it is also known that Lievens collaborated with the Antwerp still-life painter Jan van der Hecke (1620–84). In 1638, still in Antwerp, Lievens married Susanna de Nole, daughter of the sculptor Andries Colyn de Nole. Lievens interrupted his stay in Antwerp once to visit Leiden, probably c. 1639–40, when he painted an overmantel for the Leiden Stadhuis depicting the Justice of Scipio Africanus (destr. 1929) and etched the portrait of Daniel Heinsius, who was a professor in Leiden.

In his painted, drawn and etched portraits Lievens sought to emulate the international style of van Dyck and in his portrait drawings and prints, in particular, he occasionally achieved a level rarely equalled by his contemporaries. In his landscape drawings and paintings, a genre Lievens probably first attempted in England, he produced high-quality works characterized by a very subtle use of colour in the paintings (e.g. Landscape with Pollarded Willows, c. 1640; Paris, Fond. Custodia, Inst. Néer.) and a boldly hatched linear approach in the pen-and-ink drawings (e.g. Wooded Landscape with an Angler; Haarlem, Teylers Mus.). Several of his painted landscapes were long taken to be by Adriaen Brouwer or one of Brouwer’s followers, and the attribution of a few is still controversial. Despite Lievens’s many commissions, he still had financial problems and on 3 October 1643 his property in Antwerp was seized. He decided to leave the city, moving to Amsterdam in 1644, shortly after the baptism of his son Jan Andrea (b Antwerp, bapt 20 Jan 1644; d Amsterdam, bur 30 Jan 1680), who became an artist after training with his father. Susanna de Nole probably died soon after the birth of her son.

3. Amsterdam, 1644–74.

Lievens lived in Amsterdam for the rest of his life, although he visited The Hague (1650 and again in 1670), Berlin (c. 1653–5), Cleves (1664) and Leiden (1670–72). On 2 August 1648 he married Cornelia de Bray, daughter of the Haarlem painter Jan de Bray. Altogether Lievens had nine children from his two marriages, three of whom died young. On his return to the northern Netherlands, Lievens received many important commissions and was able to achieve an important position through his readiness to adapt to the prevailing classicizing taste. In 1650 he was commissioned by Amalia van Solms, by then widow of the Stadholder, to collaborate on the decoration of the Oranjezaal in the Huis ten Bosch (see the Hague, §V, 3). The large figures in the Five Muses (in situ) are closely in keeping with the classicizing Flemish style Lievens had developed in Antwerp. This style also brought him international acclaim; in 1653–4 he worked in Berlin for Amalia van Solms’s daughter Louisa Henrietta and her husband Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, who commissioned Mars and Venus (1653; Berlin, Jagdschloss Grunewald) and Diana with her Nymphs (1654; Potsdam, Bildergal.). Sir Robert Kerr, then in exile in Amsterdam, who had his portrait painted by Lievens shortly before the artist’s trip to Berlin (c. 1653; Edinburgh, N.P.G.), called Lievens ‘the Duke of Brandenburg’s painter’, in a letter of 1654 to his son in Scotland, adding that Lievens had such a high opinion of himself that he thought no painter in the northern and southern Netherlands or Germany could match him.

Back in Amsterdam, Lievens was commissioned to paint an overmantel in the Burgomaster’s room in the new Stadhuis (now Royal Palace) on the Dam. This large picture (1656; in situ) shows the Roman consul Suessa commanding his father Quintus Fabius Maximus to dismount from his horse before he speaks to him. Lievens received a second commission for the same building in January 1661. This belongs to the Claudius Civilis series in the Great Gallery on the theme of the Batavians’ uprising against the Romans and shows Brinio Promoted to General (1661; in situ). The colossal piece (5.46×5.38 m) was painted in great haste, and he received his payment in March of the same year. Lievens executed two paintings for the Rijnlandshuis, Leiden: The Mathematician (1668; in situ), which was completed to his design by his son Jan Andrea, and the allegorical overmantel Justice Receiving the Body of the Law from Time (1670; in situ), which was almost entirely overpainted by the Leiden painter Karel de Moor during restoration.

Lievens also obtained various important portrait commissions during his Amsterdam years. He painted the portrait of Adriaan Trip (1644; The Hague, S. Laman Trip priv. col., for illustration see Sumowski, Gemälde der Rembrandt-Schüler, 1983, p. 1929), some years later a posthumous portrait of the Vice-Admiral Maerten Harpertzs. Tromp and his wife Cornelia Teding van Berkhout (both after 1653; Amsterdam, Rijksmus.) and the poet and artist Anna Maria Schuurman (1649; London, N.G.). The black chalk portrait drawing of the lawyer Johannes Wtenbogaert (1650; Amsterdam, Hist. Mus.) and the etching of the poet Joost van den Vondel (c. 1644–50; Hollstein, no. 21) are particularly successful. Lievens was also responsible for the design of a number of woodcuts (an unusual medium in the 17th century); those of figures and heads were probably cut by a professional woodcutter, while one of a Landscape with Trees (Hollstein, no. 100) is so close to the style of his landscape drawings that it has been suggested that Lievens cut the block himself.

Eric Domela Nieuwenhuis. "Lievens, Jan." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T050989 (accessed May 8, 2012).