Isaack Luttichuys (before 1616–1673), Portrait of a Girl, c.1650. Oil on canvas, 73.8 × 63.7 cm. The National Gallery, London
On 22 March 1834 two portraits of a brother and sister were separated in a London saleroom. At the sale of Algernon Percy’s pictures, held at Phillips, the two came up as consecutive lots and left with different buyers, the boy, catalogued as a portrait of a youth holding a book, going to a Mr Cooke for just over four pounds, and the girl, listed as its companion, to a Mr Vincent for a little less, after which the two children were never again in the same room (National Gallery, n.d.). The girl is now in Trafalgar Square, the first painting by Isaack Luttichuys (1616–1673) to enter a British public collection, while the boy has slipped from view, his present whereabouts unknown.
Recognising the two as a pair took a surprisingly long time. The boy’s portrait is signed and the girl’s is not, so that once the pictures had drifted apart the link between them was lost, to the point that the girl’s canvas was recently doubted as Luttichuys’s work at all (National Gallery, n.d.). What settled the question was the old saleroom itself, since the 1834 catalogue had entered the two together as companion pieces by Luttichuys, which both confirmed the attribution of the unsigned girl and restored her missing brother to her (National Gallery, n.d.). The likeness between the children is obvious once they are set side by side, and their portraits are almost identical in size, yet the boy would have been the harder of the two to place alone, since he wears the skirts that small Dutch boys kept until they were breeched and holds a book, while his sister holds a fan (Bedaux and Ekkart, 2000). That difference of attribute is not incidental, since sibling portraits of the period routinely dressed sons and daughters alike, as miniature adults, and told them apart by what they carried, the boy with the book that pointed him toward learning and a public role, the girl with the fan and pearls that marked her for refinement and, in due course, marriage (Bedaux and Ekkart, 2000), which leaves the faces, and those small props, rather than the clothes, to distinguish brother from sister.
Luttichuys reached Amsterdam by a route the family had been travelling for two generations. His father, Barent Luttichuys, was a merchant from Münster in Westphalia, his mother, Magdalena Dykwel, came from Goes in Zeeland, and the two married in Amsterdam in 1601 before moving on to London by 1604, where their many children were born (Ebert, 2009). Isaack was baptised there on 25 February 1616 in the Dutch Reformed church at Austin Friars, so that the family belonged to the Netherlandish Reformed community in London even though its paternal line ran back to Münster, and there the name was rendered as Littlehouse, the plain translation of Luttichuys, which the Gallery still pronounces ‘Lootickhouse’ (Ebert, 2009; RKD). He and his elder brother Simon (1610–1661) moved in due course to Amsterdam, where Simon became a still-life painter admired in turn by Willem Kalf (1619–1693), and Isaack, after marrying there in 1643, built a busy and prosperous practice as a portraitist to the city’s merchant families (Ebert, 2009; National Gallery, n.d.). His years in the city were shadowed by loss, with two wives and several small children buried before him, among them more than one infant son given his own name (Ebert, 2009), and yet his likenesses kept him sought after among the Amsterdam elite for decades, so that the notion of a modest career does not really hold.
The portrait sets the child in a frankly elegant key. She stands by a column and a balustrade, her hair drawn back into a chignon with loose tendrils at the temples, in a formula that van Dyck (1599–1641) had made fashionable and that Luttichuys used again and again (National Gallery, n.d.). Nothing about her dress is austere. It is grey watered silk, the sleeves run with narrow ribbons and the bodice cut in a V and trimmed with more of them, worn over two neckerchiefs, one a translucent cambric square finished with acorn tassels, the other edged in dense lace, while pearl bracelets circle her wrists and a fan hangs from a bow in her hands. Those particulars are more than decorative for the historian, because the costume expert Marieke de Winkel, consulted by the Gallery, found that this exact arrangement of the two neckerchiefs, together with cuffs reaching all the way to the wrist, belongs only to the later 1640s (de Winkel, in National Gallery, n.d.; de Winkel, 2006). If anything, the familiar label of ‘about 1650’ therefore places the picture a year or two late.
That brightness sets Luttichuys within a particular current. Where Rembrandt (1606–1669) and Frans Hals (c. 1582/83–1666) worked in shadow and rough, vivid handling, a younger and more classicising taste was spreading through Amsterdam in these years, cooler and smoother and lighter in its palette, and nearest to the fashionable polish of Bartholomeus van der Helst (1613–1670), whose sitters carry their silks with the same poised care (National Gallery, n.d.). Luttichuys works squarely in that idiom, and the little girl in grey is a clean example of it, well dressed and set down in high, clear colour. Portraits of children of this kind were made to be kept and handed down, cherished records of the young in a century that buried a great many of them early (Bedaux and Ekkart, 2000), and a brother and sister of one household were meant to hang together as a set. What she has lost is her other half, since the portrait now hangs as a single figure, whole in itself yet plainly made to turn toward a brother who has fallen out of the record, and until that signed portrait of a boy with his book surfaces again, the pair the saleroom divided in 1834 stays half undone.
References
Bedaux, J. B. and Ekkart, R. (eds.) (2000) Pride and Joy: Children’s Portraits in the Netherlands 1500–1700. Ghent and Amsterdam: Ludion; New York: Harry N. Abrams
de Winkel, M. (2006) Fashion and Fancy: Dress and Meaning in Rembrandt’s Paintings. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press
Ebert, B. (2009) Simon und Isaack Luttichuys: Monographie mit kritischem Werkverzeichnis [Simon and Isaack Luttichuys: A Monograph with Critical Catalogue of Works]. Munich and Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag
National Gallery, London (n.d.) Isaack Luttichuys, ‘Portrait of a Girl’ (NG6690). London: The National Gallery. Available at: https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/isaack-luttichuys-portrait-of-a-girl (Accessed: 12 June 2023).
RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History (n.d.) Isaack Luttichuys. RKDartists, record no. 51429. The Hague: RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History. Available at: https://rkd.nl/en/explore/artists/51429 (Accessed: 12 June 2023).