Two new copper paintings for the Getty

6/7/23 - Acquisitions - Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum - Two new copper paintings have joined the Getty Museum since the recent entry into its collections of Lavinia Fontana’s The Marriage at Cana (see news item of 31/8/22). The first is a Portrait of a Young Man With a Ruff by Thomas Hendricksz de Keyser (ill. 1), purchased from Rob Smeets Old Master Paintings. The effigy featured on the Geneva gallery’s stand at TEFAF Maastricht 2022, as did the preparatory drawing by Lavinia Fontana, which was also acquired by the Getty (see news item 30/1/23).

1. Thomas Hendricksz. de Keyser (c. 1596-1667)
Portrait of a Young Man in a Ruff, mid-1620s
Oil on copper - 11.4 × 9 cm
Los Angeles, The J. Paul Getty Museum
Photo : The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles

See the image in its page

Considered the most important Amsterdam portraitist of the 1620s-1630s, before the arrival of Rembrandt, Thomas de Keyser was not yet represented in the Californian museum’s collections. Always in private hands, the newly acquired portrait (ill. 1) had not been exhibited publicly since the late 1960s at the Willet Holthuysen Museum in Amsterdam. It has now taken its place in the Dutch gallery of the museum’s East Pavilion, alongside a remarkable group of paintings by Pieter Lastman, Rembrandt, Jan Lievens and Gerrit Dou. Born into a family of artists, Thomas de Keyser was trained by his father, the architect and sculptor Hendrick de Keyser, as were his brothers Pieter and Willem. Like their father, all three pursued careers as architects alongside those of painter for Thomas and sculptor for Pieter and Willem. The neighbouring LACMA conserves a bronze bust of Hendrick de Keyser dated around 1615. The new small oval effigy on copper is from a decade later. Although Thomas de Keyser is mainly known for his small full-length portraits of bourgeois interiors, such as A Musician and His Daughter at the Metropolitan or Portrait of a Man Seated by a Table in the Louvre, he…