RKD STUDIES

History paintings had for a long time not taken a prominent place in Van Hoogstraten’s painted oeuvre, ever since the two early works based on models by Rembrandt. He had not turned his back on the subject, however, as his drawings reveal. There, he continued to represent narrative, mainly biblical themes in compositional studies quite steadily into the 1660s, during his second Dordrecht period, and sporadically after that. Van Hoogstraten had learned this practice from Rembrandt. It served not only to generate a stock of pictorial ideas for paintings and prints, but also to maintain and sharpen his skills in composition. Such drawings were mostly made at leisure and discretion, according to the artist’s fancy, and could serve as topics for discussion with pupils and connoisseurs. In the absence of further evidence of patronage, it seems possible that Van Hoogstraten’s late biblical paintings mainly served this kind of function as well, as free investigative works of art. He will have recalled Rembrandt’s focus on smaller, multifigured history paintings in the years he was studying with him, which were aimed at connoisseurs and the free market, and not made for patrons.¹ Decades later, Van Hoogstraten’s pupil Arent de Gelder (1645-1727) would famously produce a so-called Passion Series at his leisure, likewise in his twilight years, very likely with recollection of his two teachers, Van Hoogstraten and Rembrandt.

One gets the impression that Van Hoogstraten did not actively pursue patronage during his final years in Dordrecht, as he had just previously in The Hague. There are major gaps between the subsequent dated paintings. In 1674 he painted his second portrait of the Members of the Serment of the Dutch Mint in Dordrecht, in a much more restrained palette and tonal structure, and again in a surprisingly conventional composition of rows of heads [64]. In 1676 Van Hoogstraten painted another portrait of Mattheus van den Broucke [65]. This time, the commission was quite different, casting him not in the role of a maritime hero, but instead in that of a prominent civilian settled in his native Dordrecht. Very recently, a lavish portrait of a young woman has resurfaced at auction, bearing a signature and date of 1676. Its bulky composition contrasts with the elegance of the female portraits of the Pauw family of 1671, aligning with a late stylistic shift. Besides two rather disappointing copies of portraits of the princes of Orange, there only remains Van Hoogstraten’s small Self-portrait of 1677, which is executed in brunaille, specifically serving as a design for the etched Self-portrait for the title page of the Introduction [66].²

In the final years of his life, but still only in his forties, the artist evidently did not undertake any new adventures in subject matter, such as he had with letterboards or elegant interiors with figures, but likely focused his energy on writing his magnum opus, the Introduction to the Academy of Painting, and making etched illustrations for it and for other books, as postulated in the biography by Michiel Roscam Abbing and the essay by Stephanie Dickey in this present publication. Although it remains possible that that the chronology of the undated interiors and biblical history paintings, or of several late mythological paintings such as Venus and Adonis and Salmacis and Hermaphroditus, extends a bit beyond the early 1670s, there is no evidence of further stylistic development or new experiment in other works [67]. This is another sign that Van Hoogstraten had indeed turned his attention elsewhere.

64
and Anthony Vreem Samuel van Hoogstraten
Members of the Serment of the Dutch Mint in Dordrecht, dated 1674
Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, inv./cat.nr. DM/903/464

65
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Portrait of Mattheus van den Broucke (1620-1685), dated 1676
Dordrecht, Dordrechts Museum, inv./cat.nr. DM/890/499

66
Samuel van Hoogstraten
Self-portrait of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-1678), 1677
Dordrecht, Huis Van Gijn, inv./cat.nr. 1461