ATTRIBUTED TO THOMAS DE KEYSER | Saint Achior

Arthur Kay (1860-1939), London and Tregortha, Winton Drive, Glasgow;

His sale, London, Christie's, 11 May 1911, lot 84 (as Thomas de Keyser, Saint Sebastian), for 12 Guineas to Clanricarde;

Marquess of Clanricarde, London;

Thence by descent to the Earl of Harewood, Harewood House, Yorkshire;

By whom sold, London, Christie's, 2 July 1965, lot 94 (as Thomas de Keyser, dated 1630), to Hoogsteder;

Anonymous sale, Amsterdam, Christie's, 3 December 1985, lot 103 (as Thomas de Keyser, Saint Sebastian), where acquired.

T. Borenius, Catalogue of Pictures and Drawings at Harewood House and elsewhere in the collection of the Earl of Harewood, Oxford 1936, p. 85, cat. no. 168, reproduced, plate XXXV (as Thomas de Keyser, dated 1630, Saint Sebastian);

A. Jensen Adams, The Paintings of Thomas de Keyser (1596/7-1667), A study in Portraiture in seventeenth-century Amsterdam, Cambridge 1985, vol. III, p. 296, cat. no. R-98 (under Rejected Works; as Saint Sebastian);

W. Pijbes, M. Aarts, M.J. Bok et al, At Home in the Golden Age, exhib. cat., Zwolle 2008, p. 50, cat. no. 26, reproduced in colour (as Thomas de Keyser);

H.-J. Raupp (ed.), Niederländische Malerei des. 17. Jahrhunderts der SØR Rusche-Sammlung, vol. 4, Historien und Allegorien, Münster/Hamburg/London 2010, pp. 202-06, cat. no. 31, reproduced in colour (as Thomas de Keyser).

Property from the SØR Rusche Collection is available to view at Sotheby’s, New Bond Street, 13 – 18 September (weekdays 9am – 4.30pm; weekend 12-5pm).

Saint Achior appears in the apocryphal Book of Judith (5: 1-6; 6: 10-21). As Holofernes prepares to march upon the Israelites, Prince Achior, an Ammonite, relates the history of the Israelites, begging Holofernes to pass them by without harming them. As punishment for this attempted intervention, Holofernes orders that Achior is seized, taken to Bethulia, and tied up outside the walls of the town to suffer the same fate that Holofernes hopes to inflict upon the Israelites themselves. Achior is retrieved by the Israelites, and later converts to become a Jew.