I don’t know whether you can call someone born a century late and in the wrong country a Renaissance man, but it otherwise fits Samuel van Hoogstraten: A master painter, a poet who sometimes illustrated his works, a civic official, teacher and author of a long-standard treatise on the art and techniques of painting and—within all that, a man fascinated with illusion and a master of it.
You’ll get a small sample of one of his tricks when you look at the first two images above. Notice the distorted dog and wrong-angled surroundings? Van Hoogstraten built a 3-D perspective box and carefully painted all the details—laid out so that when you look through peepholes in the side of the box, the floor straightens out, the dog ‘unfolds; and all is right with the world. The original is in London’s National Gallery; for this exhibit, a full-scale replica of the box was built.
I took a day out of a recent trip to Brussels to visit a current exhibit at the Rembrandthuis in Amsterdam dedicated to his work—if you’re anywhere within a day’s travel, the exhibit is on through May 4.
Van Hoogstraten’s main training as an artist came as an apprentice in Rembrandt’s studio, starting at age 15. His father, Dirk, was a painter; his works are full of bright colors, multiple figures spread across the canvas. Under Rembrandt, he quickly learned to work with fewer colors, and more focus on the central composition. The portrait above, dating from that period, is likely of Samuel’s brother Jan. The self-portrait below, was made at 18 after three years as Rembrandt’s apprentice, about a year before he struck out on his own.
Rembrandt was no stranger to illusionary techniques and encouraged them in his pupil. This scene of Mary, Joseph and Jesus by Rembrandt appears to have a curtain across it to protect the pigments from light, not an unusual thing at the time. Except… there is no curtain and no rod. Most of the frame is also not a frame!
Van Hoogstraten and Rembrandt’s other three pupils were encouraged constantly to draw, whether posed informally for each other in the studio, or making sketches of different characters. Accompanied by Rembrandt, they visited wild animal exhibits. Van Hoogstraten became adept particularly at architectural drawings, such as the one below of Amsterdam’s Westerkirk.
Working from the master’s work was part of the training; below van Hoogstraten sketched a version of a Rembrandt painting of Jesus rising from the dead, and then created a more detailed work of his own, tightening the scene and reducing the character count. The fully-realized painting of Mary showing her infant shows Rembrandt’s influence in its tight focus and limited palette.
Sometimes an illusion of another sort: this painting, with its slightly illusionary blending of picture frame and door frame, is signed by Rembrandt, but experts in recent years have attributed it to van Hoogstraten. It was not an uncommon practice for a master painter to take a commission and have an apprentice complete it under supervision for the master’s signature. So, apparently the original buyer had the illusion he was buying a Rembrandt! From the same period, a van Hoogstraten portrait of Willem Drost, who became van Hoogstraten’s pupil while van Hoogstraten was still working in Rembrandt’s studio.
Of Rembrandt’s pupils, van Hoogstraten was only one of a few who worked seriously in etching and printmaking, skills he had first learned from his father.
In 1651, at age 24, van Hoogstraten took his show on the road, so to speak, traveling to Rome, London and Vienna, where he spent several years before returning to his home town of Dordrecht, where he married and established his studio. In Vienna, he found favor with a number of figures at the imperial court, with commissions for portraits such as this one, with poses and lighting learned from Rembrandt’s Night Watch. Note the left hand extending almost out of the canvas.
In Vienna, van Hoogstraten turned to a new sort of illusion painting—letter boards, trompe l’oeil images of random objects held in place by tacks and elastic bands, as we might do with magnets today. This sort of painting has been popular in different eras, but it appears that van Hoogstraten was the first. One appeared so realistic that Emperor Ferdinand III is said to have tried to pick up an object from the board. One of the boards includes an image of a medal the Emperor awarded him.
Not all of van Hoogstraten’s illusions involve the whole work; some of the most famous rely on smaller details in a larger work. Perhaps the best known, and the one used in promoting the exhibit, is the Old Man in a Window, painted in Vienna, and still in a Vienna museum. At the Rembrandthuis exhibit, it’s hung without a frame to increase the impression that there really is a stone wall with a window set in it. The devil may not be in the details, but van Hoogstraten has added plenty, including ‘carving’ his signature into the stone, and leaving small bits of detritus and a feather on the window sill.
Here’s another trick. This view of the Hofburg Palace in Vienna is mounted in a black frame, but the picture itself includes a painted black frame. At the top of the frame, a small scrap of paper identifies the artist’s work—except, of course, that there’s actually no scrap of paper.
A different sort of illusion in this painting of London’s Westminster Abbey. The perspective lines don’t converge in the usual way, and the figures are scaled to increase the illusion of the church’s size. The museum label points out that if the man sitting on the edge of the frame in the left foreground had been depicted at actual size, he would have completely blocked the view of the interior!
In England, and then after his return to the Netherlands, van Hoogstraten received quite a few portrait commissions, including Bible scholar Sir Norton Knatchbull and the Dutch admiral Mattheus van den Broucke prominent in Dutch Golden Age colonial expeditions. In the background of his portrait is van Hoogstraten’s only known seascape.
This painting has a story built in, one that I would never have guessed, but which the exhibit narrative says would have been immediately understood by a 17th-century viewer: Two men are studying a urine flask, the young women looks pale; there is a cat that has caught a mouse, the woman’s feet are on a foot warmer, and there are depictions of a naked Venus in a picture and on the tablecloth. Must have been quite a head-turner in its day!
In Dordrecht, van Hoogstraten’s fame and financial success gave him considerable social prestige as well, including an appointment as one of the Mint Masters. He and his colleagues were responsible for supervising the mint and assuring the quality of new coins—a job that came with tax benefits as well. He painted their group portrait, with himself third from left in the foreground, with his Austrian imperial medal dangling from his hand.
During his time in Dordrecht, he completed his book Introduction to the Academy of Painting; or, The Visible World, the only comprehensive work on painting written by a Dutch artist in the ‘Golden Age.’ It’s also the primary source for most of what is known about the work of Rembrandt’s studio and his teaching. Today, it’s more valuable as a source for historians and art historians, but for many years it was an influential text for art students.
Van Hoogstraten died at 51 in 1678, only months after publication of the book. Shortly before, he made an etching of himself as an author, artist, man of affairs and more to accompany a poem by Carel van Nispen honoring van Hoogstraten as a ‘true Homer of Dordrecht.’ In preparation for the etching, he painted his last self-portrait. True to his career, his last painting includes a translucent frame through which we can see a continuation of the central image.
Excellent article and photos! Very interesting.