Jan van Noordt: Painter of History and Portraits in Amsterdam (review)

Jan van Noordt was a Dutch artist who crafted a successful career painting fancy portraits and ambitious history paintings in the competitive atmosphere of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. David de Witt’s monograph on this little-known painter ably achieves its objectives. The book fills in the details of van Noordt’s biography, clears up lingering questions of attribution and misattribution, and assesses the development of the artist’s distinctive style. It contains new information about the buyers and patrons of van Noordt’s works and a solid interpretation of some of the main themes of his history paintings. It also provides a thorough and up-to-date catalogue of van Noordt’s attributed paintings and drawings – all of which are illustrated in the text. This is a reliable and well-researched book, and it will certainly become the authoritative monograph on Jan van Noordt. David de Witt is Bader Curator of Art at the Agnes Etherington Art Centre at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. His curatorial interests shape his approach, and this book will prove especially useful for curators and collectors of van Noordt’s works.

The book is organized into five chapters. The first chapter pieces together archival traces of van Noordt’s life to situate the artist in the vibrant cultural milieu of seventeenth-century Amsterdam. De Witt addresses the unresolved question of the identity of van Noordt’s teacher, making a convincing case for Jacob Adriaensz Backer. He also describes the careers of two of Van Noordt’s brothers – both prominent musicians in the city – highlighting the sort of social networking necessary to succeed in this context. The second chapter traces the development of the artist’s style. Of particular interest here is the way that van Noordt bypassed the smooth classical style that found favour with Amsterdam’s elite art patrons especially after mid-century, developing instead the rougher handling and unfinished look of Rembrandt’s late style, which had generally fallen from favour by this time. Chapter 3 tracks the artist’s marketing strategies. His earlier works tended to be small-scale paintings probably designed to sell on the open market. Like many ambitious young artists, he also used portrait painting as a means to attract elite patrons. The success of these attempts is attested to by the later works: stylish portraits and large-scale history paintings that most likely were done on commission. The fourth chapter interprets some of the main themes of van Noordt’s history paintings, making the general claim that these works functioned as moral exempla by picturing ‘practical and accessible models for conduct.’ The final chapter examines van Noordt’s extant drawings, which were executed mainly as preparatory work for his paintings.

This book is an important addition to the literature on Dutch history painting and the related genre of the portrait historié – in which sitters are portrayed in the guise of historical characters. Through close analysis of the paintings, de Witt convincingly teases out van Noordt’s idiosyncrasies – especially his unusual stylistic and narrative choices, for this artist did not seem to conform to overarching theories or models. This intriguing aspect of van Noordt’s work could have been brought forward even more if the detailed factual information of the first three chapters had been integrated with the interpretative approach of chapter 4. By arranging the book chronologically, addressing various periods of van Noordt’s career, a clearer and livelier picture of how artistic choices about style and subject matter interconnected with marketing strategies and the interests of specific patrons would have emerged. While history paintings may have functioned as general moral exempla, there was more to their appeal than this, for this genre often explicitly addressed political concerns of the day. One is left wondering whether idiosyncratic decisions about paint handling and narrative content had specific political and social resonance for the owners and viewers of these large and expensive works.