Portrait of a family on the shore of a rocky landscape, with a ship and a village beyond

This grand family portrait has recently been rehabilitated by Prof. Dr. Rudi Ekkart and Claire van den Donk to the oeuvre of Hendrick Martensz. Sorgh, one of the most significant painters working in Rotterdam in the mid-seventeenth century (private communication, May 2021).

Having trained in the workshop of David Teniers the Elder, Sorgh specialised in genre paintings and was also a skilled portraitist, often imbuing his works with a sense of narrative or action, such as in his Portrait of the Prins Family (1661; Rotterdam, Het Schielandshuis) and his Portrait of the Bierens Family (1663; Amersfoort, Rijksdienst voor het Cultureel Erfgoed). Based on the costumes of the sitters, Ekkart and van den Donk date this large, impressive canvas to the first half of the 1650s, showing the rounded faces and closely observed still lifes that were characteristic of Sorgh’s mature work.

While family portraits in the seventeenth century were by no means unusual, the scale and ambition of the present picture is less common. The relationship between the figures and the natural world recalls works like Adriaen van der Velde’s Portrait of a Couple with Two Children and a Nurse in a Landscape (1667; Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum), as well as seashore portrait settings used by artists like Jan Daemen Cool of Rotterdam and Herman Doncker of Haarlem. Ekkart and van den Donk note that as no landscape painting by Sorgh is yet known, there is good reason to assume that the fanciful village and rocky landscape were executed by another artist, whose style is reminiscent of the Rotterdam painter Jacob de Villeers (1616-1667), while the seascape may have been executed by Sorgh himself, as attested to by his numerous marine paintings.

With almost all of the figures gesturing towards one another, their deliberate arrangement appears to have been conceived with a message in mind, though its exact meaning is now lost. Flanking the group are the mother, seated at the left, and eldest son, who stands at the right in a light red over-coat embellished with gold. Beside the mother stand her three younger sons, while the father dominates the composition at the centre. Dressed in black with gold-embroidered undersleeves, he holds a document in his hand, his arms and legs spread in a gesture that suggests action. Beside him sit his two daughters, luxuriously dressed like their mother, holding a basket of roses between them, from which rises a single red and yellow variegated Switser tulip, one of the most popular bulbs during the ‘tulip mania’.

We are grateful to Prof. Dr. Rudi Ekkart and Claire van den Donk for proposing the attribution on the basis of photographs and for their assistance with this catalogue entry.