Adam de Colonia the Elder

The Dutch Golden Age in Holland was key to the rise in popularity of the genre of child portraiture, as the emergence of the middle class meant that wealth and learning became a reality for a much broader part of society. Children were depicted with a far greater degree of both realism and informality than in the work of previous generations, though the purpose of such portraits remained to a large degree to show off the wealth and status of the child's family, depicting the young sitter - as in the present work - in their finest and most fashionable garb.

The date of this portrait was previously read as 1591, following the belief that it was a likeness of the humanist Hugo de Groot (1583-1645): his age at the time (seven years old) matched that of the little boy in the picture. However, it was discovered after cleaning that the date in the inscription is in fact 1631 (which had possibly been falsified to match the identification of the sitter with De Groot).

The rediscovery of the date as 1631, though it discounted the identity of the sitter, did lead to the identification of the artist - Adam de Colonia. In his article of 2012, Rudi Ekkart identified the Dutch painter Adam Lowijsz de Colonia with Adam de Colone, a leading portrait painter in Scotland in the 1620s, and court painter to James VI. Duncan Thomson, who first extensively studied De Colone’s corpus and activity,¹ contested this association and argued for two separate painters: De Colonia (c. 1572-1651), a Dutch artist, and De Colone (active in Scotland c. 1622-28), a painter born and raised in Scotland, though of Dutch origins. Carla van de Puttelaar argues that, based on additional archival material, the Scottish painter Adam de Colone and the Rotterdam painter Adam de Colonia are almost certainly one and the same.² 

This portrait should be compared to that of a nine-year old boy by De Colonia (whereabouts unknown), of larger dimensions (68.5 x 54 cm.), but dated (1626) and inscribed in exactly the same way.³ This work is De Colonia's last dated painting to have been identified. It is probable that upon returning to Rotterdam, the artist found increased competition in the art market for commissions from artists such as the leading portraitist Jan Daemen Cool (c. 1589-1660), and younger painters including Hendrick Maertensz. Sorgh (1610-70) and Ludolf de Jongh (1616-79).

We are grateful to Carla van de Puttelaar for her help in the cataloguing of this lot.

¹ D. Thomson, The life and art of George Jamesone, Oxford 1974, pp. 54-59 and 14-49; and D. Thomson, in Painting in Scotland 1570-1650, exh. cat., Edinburgh 1975, pp. 50-55.

² See Carla van de Puttelaar’s forthcoming book: Scottish Portraiture 1644-1714 (Brepols Publishers 2021), for more information.

³ See Ekkart 2012, p. 93, reproduced p. 92, fig. 3.