One of the last pupils of Adriaen van Ostade (1610-1685) and his closest follower, Cornelis Dusart became a member of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke in 1679 and served as its dean in 1692. Dated pictures by Dusart have survived from almost every year between 1679 and 1702. After Van Ostade’s death, Dusart took over the contents of his master’s studio and completed some unfinished paintings by him, an activity that influenced him profoundly. Jan Steen and Cornelis Bega also served as other sources of inspiration for Dusart’s depictions of peasant life.
Cornelis Dusart was an immensely productive and versatile draughtsman. He is renowned for his figure studies drawn from life in black and red chalk, either with watercolor washes or executed upon colored paper and parchment. Dusart made numerous pen-and-ink drawings with a distinctive and boldly applied dark brown wash background, such as in the present drawing, which was originally part of a series portraying his forbears and other members of his family.
Only two drawings from that series, the portraits of Jan van Berckel and Jacomina de Wolf, bear Dusart’s signature in graphite at the lower edge. [1] These two drawings, now on deposit in the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, were formerly in the collection of I.Q. van Regteren Altena who wrote on the series in a 1946 article published in Oud Holland.[2] Every portrait is in a drawn oval frame and bears an inscription, which identifies the sitter, gives his or her age, date of birth, and the names of his or her parents. The drawings were made after lost paintings, the date of which can be determined by adding each sitter’s date of birth with his or her age at the time of the original portrait (1667 for our drawing). According to Van Regteren Altena and Susan Anderson, the entire series of drawings must have been done in 1694 or later by Dusart.[3]
The inscription on the present drawing identifies the sitter as “Johannes Dusart, 41 year-old, born the 16 July 1626, son of Johannes Dusart and Maria Welandt”. Johannes Dusart (1626-1691) was the father of Cornelis Dusart and a Baroque composer, organist and bell-ringer. [4] He is portrayed with the vocal score Zang-wortel en gheestelyke spruit, bastaande in verscheide zang-stukken, a book of madrigals for 2,3,4 and 5 voices and basso continuo (“continuous bass”) which he wrote after lyrics by the Dutch poets Jan Harmansz. Krul, Pieter Corneliszoon Hooft and Daniel Jonctys. The score was published by the Amsterdam music-printer and publisher Paulus Matthysz in 1653. In 1655 Johannes Dusart became an organist in the Bavokerk, Haarlem. An Utrecht native, Johannes married Catharina Brouwers on 14 May 1656, and the couple produced a son, the painter Cornelis Dusart. After Catharina’s death, Johannes remarried an organist’s daughter from Delft (1683) but this marriage proved unhappy and the elder Dusart died in 1691.
Eight others drawings from this family series are preserved in the print cabinets of the University of Leiden (in particular the Portrait of Catharina Brouwers, Johannes’ wife and Cornelis’ mother) and the Rijksprentenkabinet, Amsterdam. [5] Additionally, a Portrait of Elisabeth Brouwers, an aunt of Cornelis Dusart, was also part of the family series and is now in a private collection in southern Germany (formerly Bianchi collection). However, the location of other drawings in the series remains unknown: a Portrait of Dirck Barents van Ceulen is currently untraceable, while other drawings portraying members of Dusart’s family (Jacomina Pottij, Cornelia Brouwer and Johanna Dusart) are identifiable only through the Jan van der Vinne sale, 13 May 1754.
We are grateful to Dr. Susan Anderson (Harvard Art Museum/Fogg Museum, Cambridge) for confirming the authorship of the present drawing, and for having provided information about the Dusart family series.
[1] The parents of Johanna van Berckel, maternal grandmother of Cornelis Dusart
[2] J.Q. van Regteren Altena, “De Voorvaderen van Cornelis Dusart".
Oud-Holland, 1946, 61 (1-6), pp. 130-133
[3] E-mail from Susan Anderson.
[4] Nieuw Nederlandsch Biografisch Woordenboek, Leiden, 1911, vol. 1, pp. 765-766
[5] See the Family Tree of Cornelis Dusart
