Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–1669), Portrait of Philips Lucasz., 1635. Oil on oak, 79.5 × 58.9 cm. The National Gallery, London
In the autumn of 1629 Batavia was under siege for the second time in two years, its wells fouled and its garrison thinned by cholera, and on 21 September the governor-general, Jan Pieterszoon Coen (1587-1629), died in the thick of it (Ricklefs 1993). Jacques Specx (1588/89–1652) reached the town in time for the funeral and stepped straight into the vacant office, and among those who had made the long passage out with him was his sister-in-law, Petronella Buys (c. 1605–1670). She found her husband in the Indies. Philips Lucasz (c. 1598–1640), already high in the Company’s service, married into the same family connection, and the couple came home to Amsterdam late in 1633 (Yeager-Crasselt 2019). The portrait Rembrandt painted of him a few years later is, before anything else, a picture about the sea and what Company service cost the men who lived by it.
By the time that commission reached him, Rembrandt van Rijn was the busiest portraitist in Amsterdam and, in a sense, not yet quite his own master. Since about 1631 he had lodged with the dealer Hendrick van Uylenburgh (c. 1587–1661) and run his portrait ‘academy’, a well-drilled shop that turned out likenesses for the city’s merchant class and trained younger hands such as Ferdinand Bol and Govert Flinck; he worked there until 1635, the very year of the Lucasz panel, when he set up on his own (van de Wetering 2015). He had married into the same world in 1634, taking Uylenburgh’s cousin Saskia (1612–1642) as his wife, and the preacher who married Lucasz and Petronella in the Nieuwe Kerk, Jan Cornelisz Sylvius, belonged to the Uylenburgh connection too, which gives some sense of how tightly these commissions and these households were laced together. Lucasz and his wife did not linger over the results. On 2 May 1635 they sailed again for the East, leaving the two panels behind with the family. Whatever else the picture is, its haste can be read in two registers at once, as the pressure of a departure that would not wait and as the disputed evidence of how much of it Rembrandt painted himself.
The man who set the commission in motion was no ordinary client. Specx had helped found the Dutch trading post at Hirado in Japan in 1609 before his spell governing the Indies, and by the mid-1630s he was back in Amsterdam, wealthy, and buying pictures with real ambition; among the works plausibly from his collection were Rembrandt histories, including the Abduction of Europa of 1632, now at the Getty, and the Storm on the Sea of Galilee later stolen from the Gardner in Boston (Yeager-Crasselt 2019). Whether he ordered the pendants outright or was given them by the sitters before they sailed was already an open question to I.H. van Eeghen, who leaned toward the second reading (van Eeghen 1956); either way, a patron of that kind, at ease with Rembrandt’s history painting, is the last man one would expect to fob off with a routine studio portrait, which is among the better arguments for taking both panels as autograph. There is a further point about function that tends to get lost in the attribution wrangling. These were pendants made to be left behind. A portrait that hangs in the family house while its subject is at sea for years does a particular kind of work, standing in for an absent man who may not come back, and in Lucasz’s case that is exactly how things fell out.
The likeness gives Lucasz the sober uniform of his rank: black tunic, broad white collar, and a heavy gold chain across the chest. The chain is the one element a contemporary would have read at once, since the Company’s directors, the Heeren XVII, awarded such chains to commanders who had brought the homeward fleet safely in, and Lucasz had steered exactly such a fleet into port in December 1633 (MacLaren and Brown 1991). What has kept cataloguers arguing is the handling. The collar is not built up in the ordinary way, pale lace over a dark ground; instead the painter laid down a solid block of lead white and scored the pattern of the lace into it in black, in places before the white had set, and the chain is struck in with the same economy, quick yellow strokes over the tunic that sit on top of the white where the links cross behind the collar rather than beneath it (Bomford et al. 2006). An X-radiograph shows the composition was once different again: the sitter’s left hand rested on the chain and was afterwards painted out, probably in the seventeenth century (MacLaren and Brown 1991). Someone later papered the back of the panel with fragments of a printed list of French naval appointments running from 1641 to 1673, a coincidence of subject the object seems to have attracted rather than sought.
For most of its recorded life the portrait passed without question as Rembrandt’s, and it took the Rembrandt Research Project to unsettle it. In the third volume of their Corpus, Josua Bruyn and Bob Haak proposed that Rembrandt had painted only the face and left the costume, the collar and the whole of Petronella’s pendant to an assistant, the flat modelling and summary lace being, on their reading, the marks of a lesser hand (Bruyn et al. 1989). Ernst van de Wetering (1938–2021) moved the line back and forth over the following decades and, in the revised Corpus of 2015, returned rather more of the work to Rembrandt (van de Wetering 2015), while the National Gallery’s own team held that both panels were autograph throughout and that the strange collar was ‘a kind of brilliant shorthand’, the sign of a fluent hand working at speed (Bomford et al. 2006). Gary Schwartz, Christian Tümpel and Walter Liedtke were among those never persuaded by the demotion (Yeager-Crasselt 2019). The disagreement has more bite than it first appears, because 1635 is precisely the year Rembrandt was closing out his time in Uylenburgh’s portrait shop and setting up alone, so the question of how much of a 1635 portrait a workshop hand might have done is not an abstraction imposed by later connoisseurs; it is a question about how the studio actually ran in the months this panel left it. A recent micro-XRF study of the closely related Portrait of Maertgen van Bilderbeecq has shown that the white-first, black-openings way of painting lace is fundamentally Rembrandt’s own habit (Schütt and Gerken 2025), which does weaken the case for an assistant in the collar; and yet a shop built to reproduce the master’s manner is exactly the place where such a habit would be taught, so the technical evidence narrows the question without closing it. Speed explains how the picture looks. It cannot, on its own, tell whose speed it was.
It is tempting to make Rembrandt himself a man of the East India trade, and worth resisting the temptation, because his connection to the Company was always at one remove. He never sailed and never held a post; what he had was an Amsterdam saturated by the Company’s cargoes, a clientele that included its officials, and, much later, a collection stocked with the things its ships carried home. The inventory drawn up at his insolvency in 1656 lists Asian curiosities, weapons and an album of Indian miniatures, and in the 1650s he made some two dozen drawings after Mughal portraits on Japanese paper, the one sustained encounter in his work with an art from outside Europe (Schrader 2018). Set the Lucasz portrait of 1635 beside those late sheets and the shape of the relationship comes clear. In the 1630s the Company was a source of sitters and money; by the 1650s it had become a source of images and ideas. The portrait of a Company officer with a gold chain and the drawings after a Mughal emperor sit at the two ends of one long thread, and Specx, who had lived in Japan and governed Batavia, is as good a figure as any to stand at its near end.
What sharpens all of this is that the sitter did not have long. Lucasz went back to the work the chain commemorated, and he died at sea early in 1640, on the passage back to Batavia from the Ceylon campaign that had just taken the Portuguese fort at Negombo ; the year is often given as 1641, though the voyage ties his death to the fighting of 1640. The hurried likeness of 1635 became, without anyone intending it, the last there would ever be. Petronella came home a widow and married again. The pendants were parted before the nineteenth century and have seldom been seen together since. Between them they record a plain and brutal arithmetic, in which a gold chain and a fortune were what the Company paid out for voyages that killed a fair number of the men who made them. As for the hand that once lay on that chain and was quietly taken away, it is hard not to wonder who removed it, and what they supposed they were tidying out of the picture.
References
Bomford, D., Kirby, J., Roy, A., Rüger, A. and White, R. (2006) Art in the Making: Rembrandt. New edn. London: National Gallery Company / New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, pp. 82–88 (cat. no. 5).
Bruyn, J., Haak, B., Levie, S.H., van Thiel, P.J.J. and van de Wetering, E. (1989) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, Volume III: 1635–1642. Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff, cat. no. A 115.
Hofstede de Groot, C. (1913) ‘Rembrandts portretten van Philips Lucasse en Petronella Buys’ [Rembrandt’s portraits of Philips Lucasz and Petronella Buys], Oud Holland, 31(5), pp. 236–240.
Leupe, P.A. (1855) ‘Philip Lucasz., raad en directeur-generaal van Nederlandsch-Indië’ [Philip Lucasz, councillor and director-general of the Dutch Indies], Zeeland almanac.
MacLaren, N. (1991) National Gallery Catalogues: The Dutch School, 1600–1900. Revised and expanded by C. Brown. 2nd edn, 2 vols. London: National Gallery, pp. 343–346 (cat. no. 850).
Ricklefs, M.C. (1993) A History of Modern Indonesia since c. 1300. 2nd edn. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press
Schrader, S. (ed.) (2018) Rembrandt and the Inspiration of India. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum
Schütt, F. and Gerken, M. (2025) ‘Micro-XRF Meets Maertgen van Bilderbeecq: Investigating an Early Portrait by Rembrandt’, ArtMatters: International Journal for Technical Art History, Special Issue 2, pp. 33–45.
van de Wetering, E. (ed.) (2015) A Corpus of Rembrandt Paintings, Volume VI: Rembrandt’s Paintings Revisited – A Complete Survey. Dordrecht: Springer, cat. no. 132a.
van Eeghen, I.H. (1956) ‘De portretten van Philips Lucas en Petronella Buys’ [The portraits of Philips Lucas and Petronella Buys], Maandblad Amstelodamum, 43, p. 116.
Yeager-Crasselt, L. (2019, updated 2026) ‘Portrait of Petronella Buys (1605–1670)’, in Wheelock, A.K. Jr and Nogrady, E. (eds) The Leiden Collection Catalogue. New York. Available at: https://www.theleidencollection.com/artwork/portrait-of-petronella-buys-1605-1670/ (Accessed: 12 Junw 2023).
van de Wetering, E. ‘A Painter in his Workshop: Rembrandt Investigates the Usefulness of Linear Perspective’. Academia.edu. Available at: https://www.academia.edu/42833749/A_painter_in_his_workshop_Rembrandt_investigates_the_usefulness_of_linear_perspective (Accessed: 11 June 2023).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Philips Lucasz., 1635. RKDimages, image no. 32160. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/32160 (Accessed: 11June 2023).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Rembrandt van Rijn, Portrait of Petronella Buys, 1635. RKDimages, image no. 32161. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/images/32161 (Accessed: 11 June 2023).