Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy Amsterdam bapt 1588 - 1650/6

"The following condition report has been provided by Henry Gentle, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. The oak panel has two repaired and reinforced vertical joins both of which are unstable. There are also two small unstable hairline splits. Most of the paint surface is stable apart from some small raised areas to the sitter's collar and hat and to the background. Beneath an opaque and discoloured varnish can be seen thinnesses to the darker passages of the sitter's dress and a scattering of retouchings in the background. Removal of the varnish would improve the tonality."
"This lot is offered for sale subject to Sotheby's Conditions of Business, which are available on request and printed in Sotheby's sale catalogues. The independent reports contained in this document are provided for prospective bidders' information only and without warranty by Sotheby's or the Seller."

The son of an armorial stonemason, Elias Claesz. Pickenoy who emigrated from Antwerp to Amsterdam, Nicolaes Eliasz. Pickenoy was the leading portraitist in Amsterdam in the early seventeenth century. He may have been a pupil of Cornelis van der Voort and, although no pure portraits prior to 1620 survive, his earliest extant work is the Anatomy lesson of Sebastian Egbertsz. de Vrij of 1619 in the Amsterdam Historisches Museum.¹  

Dated 1622, this is one of Pickenoy's earliest portraits. Within a few years of this work his fame had outgrown that of Van der Voort and he was to paint portraits of three regents and execute five group-portraits of civic guard companies between 1625 and 1645; one of these, a large militia company now in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, was for the series of civic guard-portraits in the Kloveniersdoelen (or Musketeers Hall) to which Rembrandt's Night Watch also originally belonged.

We are grateful to Dr. Rudolf Ekkart and Mr. Fred G. Meijer for endorsing the attribution to Pickenoy on the basis of photographs.

1. See G. Luijten & A. van Suchtelen, Dawn of the Golden Age, exhibition catalogue, Zwolle 1993, pp. 595-6, no. 268, reproduced.