Isaack Luttichuys’s portraits of Andries Rijckaert (1636-1716) and his sister, Susanna Rijckaert (born 1635) are fine examples of his "society portraiture” and have the rare distinction of being able to trace their provenance directly back to the sitters themselves. Susanna is portrayed sitting before a blue curtain, her left arm resting on a red cloth, draped over a stone balustrade. She is dressed in a fashionable, yet restrained black and white costume with very wide, puffed sleeves and a double-layered collar, which covers her shoulders. Her hair is worn in ringlets, crowned with a small black cap (tipmuts). She wears a double string of pearls around her neck, pearl bracelets, rings on her fingers, a jewelled clasp in her hair and matching drop earrings. With an elegant gesture of her right hand, she fingers a handsome broach pinned to her bodice. She has blue eyes and a pale, creamy complexion. Her younger brother stands against a similar backdrop, facing towards the viewer, with one hand resting on his hip and the other tucked into his brown doublet, the sleeve of which is split to reveal a voluminous white chemise and diaphanous cuff. He sports a dashing moustache, long brown periwig and a broad bib-fronted band of white cambric, trimmed with a deep border of lace. He wears a purple ribbon around his wrist, while loops of lavender-coloured ribbons, or galants, decorate the top of his breeches. This extravagant outfit was clearly the dernier cri in the 1660s and reflects the height of French fashion. He conveys an air of casual elegance.

Susanna and Andries Rijckaert were the children of Johannes Rijckaert (1609-1679) and Cornelia Merchijs (1614-1694) and the grandchildren of Pieter Merchijs (1582 – before 1628), a merchant from Amsterdam, and his first wife, Sara Berrewijns. Fine pendant portraits of Peter Merchijs and his second wife, Maria Florianus, were painted by Cornelis van der Voort in 1622, which also remained with descendents of the family until 2007ⁱ. Little is know about the lives of the sitters depicted here: Susanna was certainly married twice, in 1655, to Nicolaes van den Heuvel, who died only a year later, and then in 1658, to Jacob van Wisselt. Andries remained unmarried.

Although nothing is known about Luttichuy’s artistic training or when precisely he arrived in Amsterdam, his oeuvre indicates that, broadly speaking, his stylistic evolution followed the general trends in portraiture of his day. His earliest works hint at Rembrandt, but as the latter’s pre-eminence in Amsterdam waned in the 1640s and was replaced by that of Bartholomeus van der Helst, so Isaack turned increasingly to van der Helst as his model. The other major influence on his development was that of the Flemish master, Anthony van Dyck, whose elegant and courtly style was introduced into Holland in the late 1630s and early ‘40s by such artists as Adriaen Hanneman and Cornelius Jonson van Ceulen. Isaack’s mature period began around 1650, by which time he had evolved a distinctive personal style that combines elements of van Dyck’s elegance with the robust realism of van der Helst. Dated portraits by Luttichuys exist for almost every year of the following two decades, the majority of which depict their sitters at half-length in life-size format. Isaack’s patrons seem to have been drawn mostly from Amsterdam’s wealthy burgher classes, but he also occasionally portrayed scholars and publishers.

These two portraits from Luttichuys’s maturity exemplify the artist’s elegant, painterly manner and his sensitive response to the individuality of the sitters. The subtle, rather cool palette is characteristic, as is the clear, even light. Isaack displays a great eye for detail in his precise rendering of the young people’s costly clothing and accessories, which testify to their wealth and social status. Using lively brushwork, he perfectly describes the various textures of corduroy, linen, silk, transparent voile and lace. Close observation of the young man’s collar reveals that the intricate motifs in the dentelle opaque, as this type of lace was known, was achieved by scratching out the design in the top layer of wet paint using the end of the brush to reveal the darker tone beneath. Although this technique was by no means unique to Luttichuys, it was his normal method for realising the appearance of lace. The heavy curtains of shimmering moiré silk which hang behind the figures were one of the artist’s standard backdrops and appear elsewhere in his oeuvre.

Very little is known about the life of Isaack Luttichuys. He was born in London in 1616, the son of Dutch parents who returned to the Netherlands while their children were still young. There is no record of where or with whom her trained. In 1638, he was first recorded in Amsterdam, when he made a now lost portrait drawing of Anna Blaeu, the mother of the poet P. C. Hooft, known to us today through a copy by Jan Stolker. His older brother, Simon Luttichuys, also settled in Amsterdam and became a still life painter. Isaack married in Amsterdam on 3rd April 1643 and remained there until his death in 1638.

P.M.

1. Cornelis van der Voort (1576-1624), Portraits of Pieter Merchijs and his wife, Maria Florianus, on panel, each approximately 122.5 x 89.6 cm, Sotheby’s Amsterdam, 14th November, 2007, Lot no. 49.