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for Thomas de Keyser
Thomas de Keyser
Dutch, 1596/97 - 1667
Painter, son of (1) Hendrick de Keyser I. Following an apprenticeship with an unidentified master in painting, he trained from 1616 to 1618 with his father in architecture. Although he ultimately followed his father and two brothers, Pieter and Willem, into service for the city of Amsterdam as city mason (1662–7), no designs for buildings by Thomas are known, with the exception of an unbuilt triumphal arch published in Salomon de Bray’s Architectura moderna (1631; see (1), §2 above). Thomas de Keyser turned to painting, producing highly original portraits. He played a significant role in creating innovative portrait types that were favoured by members of the newly risen class of Dutch burghers. He worked in nearly every type of portrait format produced in the northern Netherlands in the 17th century.
While there is little chronological development in de Keyser’s work, there are nonetheless distinct stylistic differences in his portrait types. Throughout his career he worked over the surfaces of his panels with a free, yet meticulous, touch that distinguishes his work from the transparent glazes of Gerrit Dou and the work of the Leiden ‘fine’ painters, which his small interiors otherwise recall. He possessed a delicate sensibility for unusual colour contrasts and for gradations of tone, even within the greys and blacks of his more soberly dressed patrons. In contrast to the dusky interiors of Gerard Terborch (ii)’s genre scenes (similar in theme to many of de Keyser’s small-scale portraits), the clear, airless rooms in which de Keyser’s sitters stand or sit are crisply delineated; such attention to architectural detail no doubt reflects in part his training and continued exposure to the building activities of his family.
Circumstantial evidence indicates that his teacher may have been Cornelis van der Voort (1576–1624), a leading Amsterdam portrait painter of the previous generation. De Keyser seems also to have been aware of the work of Werner van den Valckert and his near contemporary Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy. The Anatomy Lesson of Sebastiaen Egbertsz. de Vrij (1619; Amsterdam, Hist. Mus.), for many years considered de Keyser’s earliest dated painting, has been convincingly reattributed to Pickenoy (see 1993–4 exh. cat., no. 268). De Keyser seems to have obtained the commissions for several of his paintings through the patrons of his family’s architectural practice.
During the second half of the 1620s de Keyser evolved the genre for which he is best known: the small-scale full-length portrait of a figure in a contemporary interior. In these works he combined the prestige of traditional compositions and attributes of court portraiture with everyday objects to produce a highly original type. His portrait of Constantijn Huygens and his Clerk depicts the Stadholder’s secretary seated at a table, accepting a letter from a deferential youth. The image recalls works such as Titian’s Paul III and his Grandsons (Naples, Capodimonte), but de Keyser placed Huygens in a realistically rendered study, surrounded by objects that refer to his wide-ranging interests and pursuits. De Keyser’s largest and most important portrait commission was his Company of Captain Allaert Cloeck and Lieutenant Lucas Jacobsz. Rotgans, finished in 1632 (Amsterdam, Rijksmus.). His two early designs for the work (Copenhagen, Stat. Mus. Kst; ex-Albertina, Vienna) depict the men in active poses and a variety of military costume that presage some of the innovative conventions of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’. The more traditional treatment of the painting as finished may have responded to the desire of the predominantly Remonstrant group to align themselves with the prestige of their 16th-century predecessors. De Keyser probably obtained the commission through his brother (2) Pieter de Keyser, who at the time was enlarging the Kloveniersdoelen in which it was to hang.
By the mid-1630s, when his own children were young, de Keyser painted several innovative family portraits in the small-scale format. Such paintings as Portrait of a Couple and Two Children (1639; Oslo, N.G.) are among the earliest examples in the northern Netherlands to treat the family in a secular context. Much later, in the early 1660s, de Keyser once again reduced a full-length court portrait type, the equestrian portrait, for his patrons with patrician pretensions (see below). He also created several portraits of figures in historical settings, including a highly unusual portrait subject, a Biblical Scene, possibly representing Tobias with Tobit regaining his sight, with a portrait of a man (1633; Utrecht, Catharijneconvent). While almost exclusively a portrait painter, de Keyser painted a number of religious subjects around 1635, including a Crucifixion (Moscow, Pushkin Mus.) and a pendent pair, an Entombment (Antwerp, priv. col., see Adams, no. 62) and a Resurrection (see Adams, no. 63). These lack the originality of his portraits and were probably composed with the aid of prints.
Like many artists in the volatile economy of the northern Netherlands during the 1640s, de Keyser turned much of his energy to another profession, joining his brother Pieter in the trading of building stone and marble. Both their sources and their markets were international, including substantial dealings with their brother-in-law Nicholas Stone in London. The resultant contact with contemporary English court portraiture may have inspired certain elements in de Keyser’s work, specifically his use of the small-scale full-length format. Although his production declined in the 1640s, de Keyser did not cease painting altogether. The portraits from these years most often represent colleagues of his new activities: architects, sculptors and engineers. In 1652 he obtained the commission for an important history painting, Ulysses Beseeching Nausicaa, for Amsterdam’s new Stadhuis (now Royal Palace) at the time when his brother Willem was overseeing its construction. De Keyser’s last known painting, Equestrian Portrait of Two Men (Dresden, Zwinger, Gemäldegal. Alte Meister), dates from 1661. De Keyser’s compositions and iconography had considerable impact, not only on subsequent Dutch portraiture but also on Dutch genre painting; there is a reciprocal influence, for example, between the imagery of his small-scale full-length portraits and that of the portraits and genre paintings of Pieter Codde and Willem Duyster during the 1620s.
Paul H. Rem, et al. "Keyser, de." In Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com.proxy.lib.fsu.edu/subscriber/article/grove/art/T046383 (accessed May 8, 2012).
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