傑拉德·凡·庫伊吉

Rhenish Noble collection;
Sale, Stuttgart, Nagel, 29 March 2006, lot 464;
There acquired by the present owner.

Gorinchem, Gorkums Museum, on loan, 2009-2015.

The following condition report has been provided by Simon Parkes of Simon Parkes Art Conservation, Inc. 502 East 74th St. New York, NY 212-734-3920, simonparkes@msn.com, an independent restorer who is not an employee of Sotheby's. This work is restored and should be hung in its current condition. The painting has been lined. The canvas is made from two pieces joined vertically through the center. The surface is stable and still has an attractive texture. The brown colors in the lute, and to a lesser degree in the cello on the left, have weakened slightly. The background has developed some thinness which has received a few retouches. Retouches have also been added along the original canvas join. There are other tiny specks of retouching visible under ultraviolet light, which to be expected from a work of this period and size. The painting should be hung as is.
"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."

Hitherto unpublished, this Musical Party is undoubtedly the most significant recent addition to the known oeuvre of Gerard van Kuijl. A member of an old Catholic family from Gorinchem, Van Kuijl is recorded for the first time in Utrecht in 1625 when he acted as a witness to the will of Sophia Coopmans, the wife of the painter Gerrit van Honthorst. From this it may be inferred that Van Kuijl and his fellow witness Alexander van Wevelinchoven were pupils of Honthorst. Both men subsequently travelled to Italy, where a Gerardo fiammingo or Gherardo pittore is recorded in 1629 living in Rome in the house of Giovanni del Campo (Jean Ducamps) on the Via Margutta . After the death of his friend that same year, Van kuijl remained in Rome for a further two years, as a member of the community of Dutch artists known as the Bentveughels, where he acquired the nickname Stijbeugel or ‘Stirrup’. No paintings from this Italian period have survived. By 1632 he had returned to his native town and soon after married. Between 1638 and 1642 he and his family lived briefly in Utrecht, but after this he is documented back in Gorinchem, where he stayed until his death in 1673.

This painting provides a most elegant confirmation of the known details of Van kuijl’s life. The theme of musical companies such as this was one of the favorite subjects of his teacher Gerrit van Honthorst and his followers, notably among the circle of Caravaggesque painters based in Utrecht (to which Van Kuijl was evidently connected), who had seen this aspect of Caravaggio’s style in Rome and imported it to the northern Netherlands in the first half of the seventeenth century. This seems to be the largest and grandest of Van Kuijl’s several treatments of the subject. The earliest is the Musical Company of 1651 in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, in which some motifs such as the viol-da-gamba player anchoring one side of the composition and the young boy at the table are common to this painting too.¹ A similar date of execution should be considered for the present work. In another canvas of 1662, a Concert today in the Gorkums Museum in Gorinchem, we see a very similar young girl – perhaps the same model - holding music in the foreground and a similar youth in a feathered cap playing the violin.² The motif of the figures gathered around a table draped with a carpet is repeated in another undated canvas of a Musical company sold London, Christie’s, 23 April 1993, lot 16, and here too a viol-da-gamba player holds the left side of the composition.³ In these three paintings, the influence of Gerrit van Honthorst is less keenly felt than in the work in Amsterdam.

Although the earliest history of this painting is not yet known, as Guido Jansen has recently observed (private communication), it is tempting to associate it with Van kuijl’s circle of friends and patrons in Gorinchem, and in particular to the family of his fellow student Alexander van Wevelinchoven. His wife Margaretha’s sister, Maria, was married into the van Wevelinchoven family, and Van kuijl is known to have painted portraits of individual members of the family as well as a group portrait. This latter is now untraced but like the present painting also seems to have had a subsequent history in Germany, in this case being recorded among German descendants of the Van Wevelinchoven family in their castle, Schloss Wohfskuhlen, near Rheinberg in Westphalia. It is very possible that his picture’s traditional provenance in ‘an old Rhenish Noble family’ may hint at a similar fortune, but no inventories have survived which can securely establish this.

 

 

 

 

 

1. Canvas 99 x 131 cm. For which see E.J. Sluijter, ‘Niet Gysbert van der Kuyl iut Gouda, maar Gerard van Kuijl uit Gorinchem (1604-1673)’, in Oud Holland, 91, 1977, pp. 166-194, cat. no. A8.
2. Canvas 118 x 150 cm. Sluyters 1977, cat. no. A10.
3. Canvas 124 x 180 cm. Sluyters 1977, cat. no. A7.