The Artist: Maarten van Heemskerck was born in 1498, the son of a prosperous farmer, Jacob Willemsz van Veen. Living in the town of Heemskerck, north of Haarlem, according to the biographer Karel van Mander, Maarten first studied with Cornelis Willemsz and later on with Jan Lucasz in Delft. When he joined the studio of Jan van Scorel (1495–1562) in Haarlem in about 1527, he served as an apprentice to Scorel who was only three years older. It was there that Heemskerck first learned and began to assimilate Italian style, which had influenced van Scorel from his trip to Venice and Rome in 1518/20–23. An early demonstration of Heemskerck’s skill in this regard was his
Saint Luke Painting the Virgin of 1532 (Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem) that he presented to the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke. He also began to gain a reputation as a skilled portrait painter, exemplified among others in The Met’s Portrait of Jacob Willemsz van Veen, the artist’s father.
Reportedly, much to his father’s chagrin, Heemskerck departed for Rome in 1532. He made numerous drawings of classical sculpture and architecture, surviving in two sketchbooks (Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin) that provided him with source material for paintings throughout his career. In 1536, Heemskerck returned to the Netherlands and settled in Haarlem, soon taking up the position of president of the Guild of Saint Luke. There he developed a profitable business with ongoing commissions from high profile citizens, among them Cornelis Muys in Delft. This led to other commissions, namely for the Nieuwe Kerk for their Guild of Saint Luke. Later, in 1553, Heemskerck became the curate of Sint-Bavokerk, serving there for twenty-two years. Amsterdam became his new home in 1572, a move necessitated by the Spanish siege of Haarlem.
Resulting from Heemskerck’s travel experiences are not only his famous sketchbooks, but also a series of prints—the so-called Wonders of the World—engraved by Philip Galle. This led to his providing hundreds of drawings for professional printmakers that disseminated Heemskerck’s style, especially what he had gained from his Roman sojourn. However, it is his painted oeuvre, of which many examples survive, that is the best known. Early on he garnered important commissions for large-scale religious paintings, among them the wings for Van Scorel’s
Crucifixion altarpiece in Amsterdam (1538–41, now lost), the
Passion Triptych for Sint-Laurenskerk in Alkmaar, and a large Crucifixion of 1543 for the Riches Claires of Ghent (Museum voor Schone Kunsten, Ghent). In his later years, he continued to provide major altarpieces for churches and other religious institutions, as well as making specific nods to his Italian experiences, as in his copy of Raphael’s
Madonna of Lareto of 1551 (Frans Hals Museum) or his 1552 view of a bull race inside the Colosseum of Rome (Palais des Beaux-Arts de Lille). Along with Jan van Scorel, Heemskerck is justly celebrated for his introduction of Italian art to the North Netherlands. He died a wealthy man in 1574, having been highly respected and an especially strong influence on painters in Haarlem.
The Painting: This three-quarter view portrait represents Jacob Willemsz. van Veen, Maarten van Heemskerck’s father (d. September 16, 1535). His attire—a white linen shirt, black jerkin with cape, and black shearling hat—and his forthright demeanor present him as a gentleman farmer of elevated status. An inscription in Dutch at the bottom of the portrait, appearing as Gothic script on the face of a stone parapet, can be translated as "My son portrayed me here when I was 75 years old, as they say." Although individual portraits with plain dark backgrounds hark back to fifteenth-century Flemish examples, notably by Jan van Eyck, such “speaking portraits,” whereby the sitter identifies himself to the viewer, were a more modern humanist convention. For example, in The Met’s 1517
Portrait of Benedikt von Hertenstein (born about 1495, died 1522) by Hans Holbein the Younger (
06.1038), the sitter directly addresses the viewer while announcing "When I looked like this I was twenty-two years old," as inscribed in German on the wall next to his head.
The straightforward account of Van Veen’s age and relationship to his artist son, the immediacy of his stern features with deeply furrowed brow, and the seemingly shallow space in which he is placed, confront the viewer with the presence of an unsympathetic man nearing the end of his life. The portrait is dated 1532, that is, the same year Maarten van Heemskerck left Haarlem to study painting in Italy, and the picture may have served as a farewell gift from a son to his father. Three years later, while Heemskerck was still abroad, Jacob van Veen died.
Considerably after his return from Italy in 1537 and only four years before his own death in 1574, Heemskerck erected a monument to his father in the cemetery of the Dutch Reformed church in Heemskerck (Sintobin 1998). Influenced by his time in Italy, Heemskerck shaped the memorial like an obelisk that shows a profile portrait head of Van Veen, a Latin inscription to his memory, and a putto extinguishing an upside-down torch while resting his right foot on a skull. Just below, the Latin words “Cogita Mori” (think upon death) complement the classical imagery.
The Attribution and Date: Heemskerck dated and signed the portrait 1532 with his monogram HVM. Dutch painter and artists’ biographer Karel Van Mander wrote in his
Schilder-boeck of 1604 that Van Veen was a wealthy farmer whose anger at his son’s artistic ambitions forced Heemskerck to leave home. It is tempting, therefore, to read into the unflinching depiction of Van Veen a very personal and revealing portrayal of the tense relationship between father and son. Indeed, Heemskerck’s painting of his father differs from his other early portraits, which tend to present a more spacious setting for their subjects. Take, for example, the
Portrait of a Twelve-year-old Boy of 1531 (Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; see fig. 1 above).[1] The engaging youth, in three-quarter view, is more comfortably situated behind a ledge as he pauses with quill pen in hand while writing on a paper held in his left hand. In mirror cursive writing, the paper’s Latin text reads:
Oia dat dominus non habet ergo mius (The Lord gives everything yet does not therefore have less). The text below also in Latin and in classical script is:
Quis dives? Qui nil cupit. Quis. Pauper? Avar (Who is rich? He who covets nothing. Who is poor? The grasping miser.). In this case, the young scholar is being given moral instruction for his life through texts taken from writings by Erasmus, which he in turn conveys to the viewer.[2] In each example, Heemskerck incorporates in the paintings texts that explain the situation of the sitter: the one of Van Veen presents his self-reflection late in life in a deeply personal vein, while the other is broadly didactic about the intentions of the young scholar to gather knowledge and wisdom early on toward a pious and righteous life.[3]
In his early works, Heemskerck was particularly influenced by his teacher in Haarlem, Jan van Scorel (1495–1562), who worked there, taking on students from 1527–30. Van Scorel’s
Portrait of a Man, dated 1529 on the frame (Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; fig. 2),[4] likewise places the sitter before a stark monochrome background, in a tightly-cropped, shallow space. The two men are similarly posed in three-quarter view and are uncompromisingly stern—even formidable—in their bearing. The similar chiaroscuro modeling of the heads emphasizes the sculptural qualities of them and a sense of unequivocal determination in these two men.
Infrared reflectography did not reveal any visible underdrawing for the figure. It is possible that a preliminary sketch was made in a material not detected by infrared reflectography, such as red chalk (see Technical Notes). More interesting is what appears to be a reworking of the background color that sets off the portrait. Technical investigations have shown that the first idea for the background color was a blue-green, subsequently changed to a red. This was later covered by the grey-green layer that we now see.[5] Heemskerck employed red backgrounds in some of his other paintings, such as the
Portrait of a Boy (Pinacoteca dell’Accademia Carrara, Bergamo) or the two wings of a memorial painting—the
Donor and Saint Mary Magdalen and the
Virgin and Saint John the Evangelist of about 1540 (National Gallery, London).[6] Earlier precedents for red backgrounds in North Netherlandish portraits are known by the Master of the Portraits of Princes of about 1500 (for example, the
Portrait of Engelbrecht II of Nassau, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; or the
Portrait of Lodewijk van Gruuthuse, about 1500, Groeninge Museum, Brugge) and Lucas van Leyden’s
Self-Portrait of about 1527 (Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig). If Heemskerck indeed employed a red background for the portrait of his father, later generations perhaps found that the grey-green background better suited the dour demeanor of the man.
Maryan W. Ainsworth 2023
[1] See Jeroen Giltaij in J.R.J. van Asperen de Boer et al.,
Van Eyck to Bruegel, 1400–1550, Dutch and Flemish Painting in the Collection ofthe Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam, 1994, p. 320 and nn. 2, 3. Here attributed to Jan van Scorel, but subsequently assigned by most scholars to Heemskerck. For the place of the portrait in the early works of Heemskerk and a possible identification of the sitter, see Ilja Veldman, “Adaptation, Emulation and Innovation: Scorel, Gossaert and Other Artists as a Cource of Inspiration for the Young Heemskerck,”
Oud Holland 132 (2019), pp. 175–76.
[2] Translations of the texts are in Friso Lammertse et al.,
Van Eyck to Bruegel, 1400–1550, Dutch and Flemish Painting in the Collection of the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1994, p. 320.
[3] Sara van Dijk in
Remember Me, Renaissance Portraits, exh. cat., Sara van Dijk and Matthias Ubl, eds., Rijksmusuem, Amsterdam, 2021, p. 210.
[4] See M. Faries, 2009, 'Jan van Scorel,
Portrait of a Man, Haarlem, 1529', in J.P. Filedt Kok and M. Ubl (eds.),
Early Netherlandish Paintings, online coll. cat. Amsterdam: hdl.handle.net/10934/RM0001.COLLECT.5445
(Accessed 27 October 2022 18:46:48).
[5] The findings of the technical investigations of the background by Sophie Scully and Silvia Centeno are forthcoming. Their discoveries interestingly parallel those of Jessica Roeders and Mireille te Marvelde, painting conservators at the Fran Hals Museum, Haarlem, who are cleaning and restoring Heemskerck’s
Saint Luke Painting the Virgin for the forthcoming Heemskerck exhibition in the fall of 2024.
[6] My sincere thanks to Ilja Veldman and Molly Faries for discussing this matter with my by email exchanges of 12/13/22 and 3/9/23.
