Gerrit Dou Leiden 1613 - 1675

Prince Gagarin, St. Petersburg, by 1909;
Purchased by the grandfather of the present owner in Paris,
Thence by descent in the family.

The present recently discovered painting is an important work from Dou’s late period most likely painted circa 1670 shortly after his magnificent Lady at her Toilet dated 1667 in the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam.  The central figure in both paintings shares a strong physical resemblance suggesting that they could indeed represent the same sitter.  Although the execution of the Rotterdam painting is more delicate and highly finished, the treatment of the birdcages in both and the fine delicate rendering of the womens’ golden wisps of hair are very similar.  Also the choice of palette in both works with their predominantly warm reddish-orange tones is rather similar.  We are grateful to Dr. Ronni Baer for confirming the attribution based on firsthand inspection. 

Dou uses an arch as a compositional device in this painting, with a young woman leaning out to place her perroquet back in its bird cage resting on the window sill. The theme and ‘niche’ format was rare in seventeenth-century Dutch painting prior to Dou's treatment, however the many copies and versions of Dou's composition attest to its subsequent popularity. Ultimately derived from his master Rembrandt, Dou used them in images of ordinary people conducting daily, seemingly mundane activities.

Dou is considered to be the founder of the Leiden school of fijnschilders (“fine painters”), known for their small scale paintings executed in a highly finished style and with exquisite detail. Dou's father, Douwe Jansz, owned a successful glass engraving workshop in Leiden and Dou himself studied the craft for two and a half years, developing an eye for the fine details that became characteristic of his painting style. As Dr. Baer points out: “The technique of cutting glass with a diamond encouraged a steady hand…The meticulousness necessary to transfer designs on paper to glass might have provided a model for the characteristic smooth finish of Dou’s paintings and governed his use of the panel (rather than canvas) as a support better suited to obtaining this finish”.

Dou worked on oak panels, usually small in format and often prepared with a reddish-brown background.  His later paintings are marked by a strong local use of color and by a rougher, more loosely painted surface, particularly noticeably here in the clothing, skin and background. 

At the young age of thirteen, Dou joined the studio of Rembrandt as his apprentice where he remained for three years before Rembrandt left Leiden for Amsterdam in 1631.  By this time Dou had developed his own masterful style.  From Rembrandt, however Dou adopted many of his early subjects, his dramatic contrasts of light and dark, a fascination with self-portraiture, and meticulous rendering of textures. He soon gained an important patron, Pieter Spiering, who was the representative of Queen Christina of Sweden and who agreed to pay Dou a handsome annual stipend for his work.

Dou was praised publicly as an exemplary painter in 1641 and became a founding member of the Leiden painters' guild in 1648. His fame spread throughout Europe, where his paintings began to fetch high prices, being collected by Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Cosimo III de Medici, and other elite patrons. The States General of The Netherlands even included some of Dou's paintings in its gift to Charles II of England at his restoration to the British throne in 1660.  The popularity and demand for works by Dou continued well into the nineteenth century. 

The early provenance of the present work remains unclear, however the number of copies and variants attests to its immediate popularity.  The Musée des Beaux-Arts, Geneva, owns a version of this picture formerly in the collection of W. Crommelin. The Geneva painting was tentatively accepted by W. Martin as by Dou but questioned by Hofstede de Groot, the picture is now exhibited as a work attributed to the master and considered to be most likely painted by his pupil Domenicus van Tol.  At least two other period copies were known to have circulated on the post-war art market both considerably weaker in execution than the Geneva picture, and certainly not as good as the present panel.

We can trace the present work back to collection of the Russian Prince Nikolai Gagarin (see Fig. 1), who exhibited the picture in an exhibition of paintings in the palaces and private collections of Russia, held in St. Petersburg in 1909.  In his catalogue raisonné of the artist, Martin uses the photograph from this exhibition to illustrate the picture and notes its location as formerly in the collection of Prince Gagarin.  We are uncertain how or when it left his collection but much of that collection was sold on the European market after Gagarin's death and several items, including his Rembrandt Portrait of a Man Holding a Black Hat now in the Armand Hammer Collection, Los Angeles, were sold to Prince Troubetskoy and later appeared on the art market in Paris and Germany.

1  See Dr. R. Baer, “The Life and Art of Gerrit Dou,” in Gerrit Dou 1613 – 1675.  Master Painter in the Age of Rembrandt, exhibition catalogue, National Gallery of Art, Washington DC 2000, p. 29.