Lot 1504 N α

The painting has been requested as a loan to the Caesar van Everdingen retrospective in the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar (24.9.2016 until 22.1.2017). It has also been requested for scientific examination in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem, in advance of the retrospective.

This painting by Caesar Boetius van Everdingen is a puzzle. The lack of attribute, background landscape and narrative context do not assist its interpretation. It shows a young woman wearing an unusually shaped hat and cloaked in a grey cape. The figure leans against a balustrade, perhaps a fence, her gaze lowered, her right hand pointing down, whilst her posture offers a tantalising view of her ample décolleté. There is no pictorial space - no fore, middle or background - and no landscape. One only sees a cloudy blue-grey sky against which the figure in her hat casts a tense silhouette. The absence of pictorial space intensifies the striking presence of the sculptural figure, strongly modeled in light and dark and yet whose warm incarnation is depicted with flowing, delicate brushstrokes.
Paul Huys Janssen (see expertise) dates the work to between 1650 and 1655 and compares it to other female half figures by van Everdingen from this period. In the light of the missing pictorial space and the ostensible view from below, Huys Janssen suggested this work could be a supraporte or ceiling painting. Albert Blankert (email from 23.6.2011) has suggested that the painting is a tronie. At its last auction, the figure was interpreted as a peasant woman whilst the exotic costume was seen in connection with the artist's sojourn in France.

We know from van Everdingen's estate inventory that he did produce a number of tronies (Huys Janssen 2002, op.cit.), so that one can follow Albert Blankert's theory, and can assume that the present work is also such a tronie. If one searches for female figures with comparable costumes in Dutch art, one actually comes across representations of peasant women with similar hats working outside (ill. 1a, 1b). The hat was worn over the customary white cap and the direction of the point of the hat could obviously vary; the engravings also suggest that the hat belonged to winter apparel. One can therefore conclude that Caesar van Everdingen's tronie shows a young Dutch peasant woman, working outside and leaning on a fence. What exactly she is doing, why she is looking down, what her gesture means, whether she is feeding the chickens or watching the flock, we are unable to determine.
A tronie of a peasant woman outside is an unusual pictorial invention; tronies generally depict young women as maids, musicians, shepherdesses or courtesans (cf. Hirschfelder 2008, op.cit., p. 209). The young woman in the present picture could be called a sister to the courtesans, as depicted by the circle of Rembrandt, particularly Willem Drost and Ferdinand Bol. Bol's tronie of a courtesan for example (see ill. 2; Hermitage, St. Petersburg) stands at a window leaning out so that her décolleté is depicted in a similarly unseemly way to that of the young peasant woman (Blankert 1982 op.cit., no. 142). Van Everdingen's tronie follows this depiction with its erotic substance, whilst the illusionistic motif of the window frame is replaced by a fence. The figure reaching over the balustrade and seemingly crossing over the pictorial boundary is derived from the illusionistic tradition of portrait painting. Van Everdingen creates an astounding presence, liveliness, and illusionism by rendering the figure in life size and reaching over the pictorial boundary so that the beholder gets the impression that he is looking through a window into the open, into the world of the 17th Dutch peasant woman.

This tronie shows Caesar van Everdingen to be an ingenious artist. Due to his obvious renunciation of any type of painterly virtuosity, as has always been admired in artists such as Rembrandt and Frans Hals, he was neglected for a long time, and was only later declared as the main representative of Dutch classicism. It is in any case a tribute to van Everdingen's pronounced modernity and individuality that his paintings are associated with the art of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres or with magical realism, and that some of his paintings were mistaken to be of French classicism, even though they were made in the Netherlands in the mid-17th century.