Aert Schouman Dordrecht 1710 - 1792 The Hague

R.J.A. te Rijdt, "Een 'nieuw' portret van een 'nieuwe' verzamelaar van kunst en naturaliën: Jan Snellen geportretteerd door Aert Schouman in 1746", in Oud Holland, vol. 110, no. I, 1997, p. 22-53, reproduced p. 23, fig. 1; 
C. Willemijn Fock, exh. cat. Het Nederlandse interieur in beeld 1600-1900, Zwolle 2001, p. 256, reproduced p. 257, fig. 221;
B.C. Sliggers, M.H. Besselink, exh. cat. Het verdwenen museum. Natuurhistorische verzamelingen 1750-1850, Blaricum/Haarlem 2002, reproduced p. 52

This rare and beautiful group portrait by Schouman was entirely unrecorded until its appearance at an auction in Dordrecht in 1994, where the subject was wrongly identified as the 19^th-century Rotterdam scientist S.C. van Vollenhoven and his family.  Robert-Jan te Rijdt, however, correctly identified the sitters and analysed the portrait in the context of Schouman’s work in his subsequent extensive publication devoted to this drawing (see Literature).  Strongly reminiscent of the style of Cornelis Troost, this work is unusual for Schouman as regards both its composition and its gouache medium, and its discovery has added significantly to our knowledge of the artist’s range and style.  It is also important as one of the relatively few surviving portraits of 18^th-century Dutch collectors, illuminating the way in which these collectors kept and displayed the specimens in their collections. 

As Te Rijdt discovered, the drawing depicts the Rotterdam merchant and sugar refiner Jan Snellen (1711-1787), together with his mother Margaretha van ‘t Wedde (1681-1751) and his first wife Krijna Vroombrouck (1693-1752), who was eighteen years older than Snellen.  There are shells and books lying on the table, while Snellen himself holds a glass bottle containing a preserved snake. In the foreground is a very animated macaw, whose feathers, perhaps coincidentally, are the colours of the Dutch flag.  Besides being a merchant and a collector of objets d’art and naturalia, Jan Snellen was also a collector of paintings and drawings, as well as an amateur artist.  Partly due to family links with Arnout Vosmaer, his great-nephew who was the director of the Stadholder Willem V’s menagerie and naturalia collections, Snellen was acquainted with many leading scientists of the day, and also with renowned collectors such as Cornelis Ploos van Amstel and the brothers Jan and Pieter Bisschop.  Little is known, however, about Snellen’s own collection of naturalia. It must have been sold at auction in Rotterdam in 1787, and included shells, insects and other animals, but unfortunately no copy of the catalogue has survived.

The present drawing provides clear evidence of Snellen’s interest in naturalia, but not of his activities as an art collector, which remain largely undocumented, chiefly because these art collections were not sold after his death, but remained in the collector’s family.  Initially the collection was inherited by his daughter from his second marriage, Margaretha Cornelia (1757-1848), who married François van Vollenhoven in 1782.  Via their child, Snellen’s godchild, the collection passed to Dr. S.C. Snellen van Vollenhoven (1816-1880), who sent a large number of drawings and prints (largely mezzotints) from the family collection to auction in 1876.  

Aert Schouman had close contacts with Jan Snellen and also knew the latter’s father, Willem Snellen (1683-1739), who was for several years a director of the East India Company in Rotterdam. Schouman made wall decorations for the family country house ‘Overmeer’ in Zoetermeer, and the contact is also documented in two of the aritst’s notebooks in the Museum Simon van Gijn, Dordrecht (Memori boek van mijn Desiepelen die ik heb onderwesen and Klad boek dienende tot het ander dat ik in s’haage heb, van’t jaar 1748).  Moreover, the biographer Johan van Gool mentioned in a publication of 1751 that there were paintings by Schouman in the possession of the Rotterdam collector Jan Snellen and it is also known that the artist bought paintings and drawings at auction, including 17^th-century works, on behalf of the young Snellen.    

In 18^th-century Holland, there were numerous well-to-do collectors of art and natural curiosities, but whereas in the 17^th century important personalities and collectors were frequently recorded in portraits, only some 45 18^th-century Dutch paintings, gouaches and pastels showing collectors and their collections are known.  Our knowledge of the activities of these collectors has therefore been based mainly on records of auction sales, although in the field of drawings the recent researches of Michiel Plomp have added greatly to our understanding of this subject (see M. Plomp, Hartstochtelijk verzameld: 18de-eeuwse Hollandse verzamelaar van tekeningen en hun collecties, 2 vols., Paris 2001).

Although Schouman made quite a number of portraits, only a very few of these are known to depict collectors.  One, a watercolour in the Louvre (inv. 23027) represents the same figures seen in the present work, and may have served as a preparatory study for this gouache, in which some of the weaker compositional details have been refined and the shells and books given more prominence (see Dessin et Sciences XVIIe-XVIIIe siecles, exhibition catalogue, Paris, Musée du Louvre, 1984, cat. no. 4, the sitters unidentified).  In addition, two other studies in pen and grey ink for collector’s portraits by Schouman are known, one, showing the collector Arnout Leers, in the Amsterdams Historisch Museum (inv.no. A18493) and the other, a portrait of an unidentified collector with his wife and son, in a private collection (reproduced in R.J.A. te Rijdt, op.cit., p. 24, fig. 3 and p. 25, fig. 4).