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Nicolaes Verkolje (1673-1746)
David van Mollem (1670-1746) and his family. Signed and dated Verkolje 1740. Panel, 63.5 × 79 cm.

The Netherlands Office for Fine arts, inv.nr. c 1882 (on loan to Amsterdams Historisch Museum, cat.nr.472, inv.nr.B 5728)

The painting was one of the centrepieces of an excellent exhibition of 1981 dedicated to the house and silk factory in which this scene takes place, an estate called Zijdebalen (Silk Bales) on the Vecht River between Utrecht and Maarssen. The authors of the catalogue traced the history of the van Mollem family silk business from the mid-seventeenth century until its sad end in 1816. The high point of the history was formed by the career of David van Mollem, who built Zijdebalen. We see him here in a painting that was probably made on the occasion of his seventieth birthday, a proud pater familias in an environment of his own making, surrounded by his progeny.

Van Mollem was a Mennonite, and he dressed in the plain black that was prescribed for all adherents of that faith. Opposite him sits his daughter-in-law Maria van Oosterwijk (not the still-life painter of that name), clad gloriously in the silks which made the van Mollems rich. All the details of the painting are moralized. Even the mulberry bush with its silkworms in the middle of the terrace is not left to speak for itself: on the edge of the pot in which it stands we read the motto 'In esca lubrum' (Profit through eating). One can practically hear old van Mollem pinning the appropriate moral on everything and everybody in his ken, just as in the painting he is pointing out to his grandson David a print of the Good Samaritan with the legend 'Hacitur in caelum via' (This is the way to get to heaven). On the back of the painting, for good measure, is painted the family tree of the sitters, in the form of a mulberry bush.

To create an environment like Zijdebalen, one has to be a practiced patron of the arts, aware of what a particular artist can and cannot do. Van Mollem, obviously, was that kind of person. One cannot help wondering whether his star might not have shined more brilliantly than it did if he had been a little less well organized and sure of himself.

Exhib. cat. Zijdebalen.