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Attributed to Arie de Vois (ca. 1632-1680)
The scholar Adriaan van Beverland with a prostitute. Inscribed Beverlandus de Prostibulis Veterum (Beverland, On the brothel in antiquity). Probably painted in 1678 (see below). Panel, 35 × 27.5 cm.

Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum, inv.nr.A 3237. Acquired in 1935 with the bequest of F.G. Waller (1867-1934), a wealthy art historian, collector and near-recluse who left most of his property to the nation. The F.G. Waller Fund is still the main source of income for acquisitions by the Rijksmuseum printroom.

If the subject is provocative, it was intended to be. Adriaan van Beverland (ca. 1652-ca. 1712), the grandson of a minister and the son and stepson of high military officers, was a gadfly. He was a serious collector of erotica, but unlike most of that tribe, who enjoy their holdings in private, he insisted on publicizing his, and doing so as mockingly as possible. He mounted obscene engravings on sheets of paper and provided them with texts from ancient authors, announcing his intention of publishing the collection as a contribution to humanistic studies, under the title On the brothel in antiquity. This plan was interrupted, however, by the reaction to another of his books, Peccatum originale, subtitled 'The socalled original sin.' His thesis, based on Scripture, that the crime of Adam and Eve was coitus, was bad enough, but the consequences he attached to it – that all sexual intercourse was sinful – led to his incarceration in the Leiden university jail, in 1679. When he was released he moved to Utrecht, where he showed the material for On the brothel in antiquity, including a title print with the same composition as this painting. The print bears the inscriptions Hadrianus Beverlandus Aet. XXVI, yielding the date 1678, and J. de Vois pinxit (after a model painted by J. de Vois), which is the basis of the attribution to Arie de Vois, the only known painter with that family name. Neither the style nor the little we know about the artist's life counters the plausibility of de Vois's authorship of the painting. The nineteenth-century artist's biographer Christiaan Kramm went so far as to endorse the attribution with the remark 'Birds of a feather flock together.'

Kramm, vol.6, pp. 1784-1785. Meijer 1971.