2

Herman van Vollenhoven (active 1611-1627 in Utrecht)
Self-portrait painting old couple. Signed and dated H. Vollenhove An° 1612 in Wtre.... Canvas, 89 x 112 cm.

Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv.nr.A 889. Purchased in 1873 from the collection of D. van der Kellen Jr. (1804-1879), chief medallist of the State Mint in Utrecht, where his father worked as a medallist before him.

The extremely strong presence of the figures in this intriguing painting, combined with a nearly total absence of information concerning it and its. maker, leave the field wide open to the observer's fantasy. That of professional art historians has tended to concentrate on the element of Vanitas: the transience of all earthly things, as expressed by the skull and hourglass beside the old couple. This feature of the painting is a carryover from sixteenth-century portraiture, where the mortality of the sitters is often underscored with details of that kind.

How, however, are we to interpret the portrait on the easel? Is it too an example of things that pass, or is the painter's work in oil supposed to represent a triumph over death (see the poem by Jan Vos in chapter 2)?

Finally, what are we to make of the position of the painter? Van Swanenburgh's self-portrait (cat.nr. 1) can be 'read' as a painter at his easel looking into a mirror and depicting what he sees there. If the reader tries to figure out how van Vollenhoven painted the work before us, he will end up in a conceptual knot like those tied so gladly by the twentieth-century Dutch artist M.C. Escher.

In the year of this painting, van Vollenhoven became a founding officer of the Utrecht guild of St. Luke. In 1626 he was paid 700 guilders by the States of Utrecht for a painting they gave as a gift to Amalia van Solms.

Kramm, vol.6, p. 1787. Würzbach, vol.2, p. 810.