A Catholic priest wanted a portrait of his philosopher friend before his departure abroad. Did Augustijn Bloemaert turn to Frans Hals for this souvenir of a deeply valued, decade-long companionship? It would not have been that unusual a commission for the Haarlem master, although his orders usually came from a more elite clientele in a time when there was plenty of money for such things.
In Holland in the first half of the seventeenth century, as the Dutch Republic flourished economically, there was a corresponding rise in the demand for portraits. Artists could hardly keep up with what one art historian has called a “rage for portraiture.”1 In particular, those Haarlem painters who enjoyed a high reputation in this genre—Hals, Johannes Verspronck, Jan de Bray, Pieter Claesz Soutman, and others—were enjoying the trickle-down benefits of the province’s prosperity. Their commissions increased with the emergence of a class of nouveau riche interested in spending their wealth and marking their social status.
Urban burghers with significant incomes decorated their homes with large and impressive paintings on biblical subjects and “history” themes from classical literature, just as the landed gentry did before them. They also had a taste for seascapes and landscapes (especially local scenes), and for still lifes showing lush arrangements of flowers, fruits, and vegetables, as well as more austere vanitas settings.2 Above all, they wanted to see themselves, and for others to see them. The brewers, textile magnates, and other affluent individuals who now dominated Haarlem’s civic life wanted themselves and their families on show for their contemporaries and preserved for future generations. Frans Hals, with his brilliant gifts as a portraitist, was fortunate enough to live just when his city’s economy—and the desire for immortality—peaked and when its citizens needed his talents most.3
More than half of Hals’s paintings are of now-anonymous sitters. Like so many of the portraits from the Dutch Golden Age—and those that are extant are only a fraction of the total number painted; most are long lost4—we simply do not know who most of these respectable, well-dressed individuals are. A fair number of Hals’s subjects, however, are easily identified; the names of others have been discovered by archival work (including such documentary support as notary records and estate inventories) and through secondary evidence (such as engravings made after painted originals). The results of this historical research provide a good picture of the sources of Hals’s patronage.
Hals was most definitely not a court painter. Unlike Van Dyck and Rubens, Hals never received any commissions from royalty. There are no portraits of kings, princes, or their consorts—or even of stadholders—in his oeuvre. He did, however, receive many commissions from the upper economic and social strata of Haarlem.5 The families who made up the local patrician class—not just owners of breweries and textile manufacturers, but prosperous professionals and merchants as well—constituted the most important set of Hals’s clients. He painted individual and family portraits of Haarlem’s leading clans and group portraits of the guilds, military guards, and civic organizations whose ranks they filled. As Seymour Slive says, “what other artists did for kings, Hals did for a citizen of Haarlem.”6
No family was more prominent in Haarlem society than the Olycans. Members of this large, wealthy clan of brewers—they owned a number of local establishments—played a highly visible and influential role in the city’s economic, political, and social life. Pieter Jacobsz Olycan and his brother Cornelis, as well as their many sons and sons-in-law, in addition to keeping the city’s beer flowing, took their turns as burgemeester, sat on the city council, and served in the civic guard. Hals painted eighteen portraits of members this extended family, either individually or (as in the case of Pieter’s son Nicolaes, owner of “The Little Ship” brewery and a lieutenant in the St. Hadrian guard) as part of a group.7
Hals painted portraits of many other brewers and their wives, including Johan Schatter (owner of “The Crowned Diamond” brewery), Willem Claesz Vooght, Andries van Hoorn (Pieter Olycans’s son-in-law), and Nicolaes van der Meer. He also received commissions from the other major branch of Haarlem’s economic elite, the textile magnates, both those of long-standing residence in the city and more recent arrivals from Flanders. There are portraits of Willem van Heythuysen, Tieleman Roosterman and his wife Catherina Brugman, and Lucas de Clercq and his wife Feyntje van Steenkiste, as well as several members of the multi-branched Coymans family. These privileged sitters were clearly pleased with Hals’s work, even with his “rough” or loose painting style and relaxed posing, so different from the typical portrait. Word obviously got around—and sometimes even beyond the confines of Haarlem—that for a certain type of portrait naer het leven (“according to life”) he was the artist to go to.
Not all of Hals’s subjects came from the world of business and the upper echelons of society. He painted portraits of preachers (Samuel Ampzing, Jacob Zaffius, Caspar Sibelius), theologians (Johannes Hoornbeeck, Jacob Revius), and historians and writers (Pieter Bor, Theodore Schrevelius). The historian and poet Pieter Schrijver and his family seem to have been particularly taken by Hals. Not only did Schrijver commission portraits of himself and of his wife Anna van der Aar, but the estate of his son Willem included a number other paintings by Hals: three small pictures from the series The Five Senses and three inherited family portraits; it was the second largest collection of Hals paintings in the period.8 In contrast with the larger, sometimes life-size portraits of wealthy clients, many of the portraits painted by Hals of his religious, intellectual, and literary contemporaries were small, and were destined to be reproduced as engravings to illustrate and promote the works of authors, such as Schrevelius’s Harlemias.9 Hals’s talents were also appreciated by his fellow artists, and some of his portraits are of other painters, including Haarlem’s Adriaen van Ostade and Jacob van Campen, the Amsterdam marine painter Jan van de Capelle (who also owned nine of Hals’s works), and, before their falling out with Hals, Jan Miense Molenaer and his wife Judith Leyster.
Hals also, on very rare occasions, painted himself. He certainly lacked Rembrandt’s fascination with his own evolving visage and moods—but then again, so did every other artist. There are a small number of likenesses of Hals by his own hand. One is the image of his face inserted among the members of the St. George Militia Company in 1639. There was also an individual self-portrait, a chest-length rendering in which a hat sits jauntily over the same albeit somewhat thinner countenance. This painting, now lost, was most likely done some ten years after the final rendering of the St. George officers10—that is, right around the time that Augustijn Bloemaert was seeking a portrait by which to remember his departing friend.
There are five extant original works of art from the seventeenth century that are said to be portraits of the great philosopher René Descartes and that are datable to within his lifetime: three paintings, one drawing, and one engraving (made after a drawing by the same artist).11 It is impossible to know with certainty how many of them really are of Descartes. There is an undeniable family resemblance among these representations. But there are also enough differences to arouse doubts about at least one of them.12
The earliest image of Descartes is an engraving by Frans van Schooten the Younger (ca. 1615–1660). Van Schooten was the son of a mathematics professor at the University of Leiden, Frans van Schooten the Elder, with whom Descartes was acquainted through their shared intellectual interests. The son, likewise a mathematician—he would take up his father’s position at the university—and sympathetic to Cartesian philosophy, also had decent artistic skills. Van Schooten the Younger also had a personal relationship with Descartes, and there are a few letters that testify to their friendship. Writing from Egmond in April 1649, Descartes expresses his gratitude to Van Schooten for sending him reading and writing materials:
I thank you for the books and all the other goods that it pleased you to send me. I have never been as well furnished with pens as I am now; and, provided that I do not lose any, I have more than I will need to continue writing for another hundred years. This will give me cause to think of you whenever I have a pen in hand. And it has been much more easy to divide 12 by 3 … than it would have been if I had not had such good pens.13
The two men also collaborated professionally. In the 1630s, when Descartes needed illustrations for the scientific and mathematical essays accompanying the Discourse on Method, he turned to Van Schooten. The artist-mathematician produced a number of woodcut prints representing, with geometrical precision, Descartes’s theories and experiments. In 1649, Van Schooten translated Descartes’s Géometrie into Latin, with his own insightful commentary, to be added to the already published Latin edition of the Discourse and other essays.14 Descartes was not overly impressed with Van Schooten’s Latin style—“son Latin n’est pas fort elegant,” he wrote—but did not take the opportunity to review it before publication; that, he says, would have “obliged me to change everything, so I completely dispensed with it.”15
Thus, the drawing and subsequent engraving that Van Schooten the Younger did of Descartes in 1644, which he later proposed as a frontispiece for his Latin version of the Géometrie, were made by someone who was directly acquainted with Descartes, and were probably done from life. One of Van Schooten’s pupils, Erasmus Bartholinus, who presumably had met Descartes, said to a friend that this portrait, of which he owned two prints, “represents [Descartes] exactly according to nature, as far as I and others can judge.”16 Descartes himself was not totally displeased by the likeness. Writing to Van Schooten several years later, when the artist sent him the engraved image for the Géometrie, he says that “je le trouve fort bien fait” (“I find it very well done”), although he adds that “the beard and the dress do not at all resemble [me].” He also did not like the fact that the motto around the portrait mentions his title (as “Lord of Perron”) and date of birth—“I have an aversion to all sorts of titles, as well as to those who make horoscopes”—and he preferred that the image not be printed in the book at all, a wish that Van Schooten respected.17
Probably around the time that Van Schooten was making his engraving, the painter Jan Lievens (1607–1674) produced a drawn portrait of Descartes. Originally from Leiden, Lievens apprenticed with Pieter Lastman in Amsterdam in 1617, just a few years before his fellow Leidener Rembrandt served the same master. Although after his apprenticeship Lievens returned to Leiden to set up his own studio (at the age of twelve!), by 1631 he was in England, followed by periods in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and The Hague, finally returning to end his career in Amsterdam. Lievens was acquainted with Constantijn Huygens, and Descartes might have sat for him while visiting his friend in The Hague, where Lievens (if he was not a resident of the city at the time) would have been carrying out one of his commissions for the Prince of Orange. Lievens’s drawing of Descartes, in black chalk and perhaps done just before Descartes left for a trip to Paris, shows the philosopher in a relaxed pose; with his finger in the air, he seems to be making an illuminating point for our benefit.
FIGURE 16. Frans van Schooten the Younger, René Descartes, 1644.
The Van Schooten engraving is an authentic portrait of the philosopher. This is confirmed by the words on the banner with which the artist surrounds the image of his friend. In the case of the Lievens drawing, the evidence for authenticity is more circumstantial but fairly compelling. Both works were almost certainly done from life.
In 1647 or 1648, Jan Baptiste Weenix (1621–1660?), a Dutch painter of genre scenes, produced a portrait generally supposed to be of Descartes (color plate 10). Weenix’s painting shows a somewhat careworn philosopher—pale skin, puffy eyes, and jowly face—holding a book open to a page with the words Mundus est fabula, “The world is a fable.” This is presumably an allusion to Descartes’s claim that the theory of the cosmos that he presents in The World is to be taken as just a story about how things might have come about solely by the lawlike interaction of bodies in motion, without the divine design described in the Bible.
It must be said, however, that the individual in the Weenix portrait—with his round, fleshy face—hardly looks like the philosopher who appears in the other works, which are contemporaneous with it; in fact, it is hard to believe that it is the same man. Either this is not really a portrait of Descartes—perhaps “mundus est fabula” refers to some other thinker’s cosmological idea—or it was not done from life. The incongruity with all other known images of Descartes remains a mystery.
Pieter Nason’s half-length portrait of Descartes is from 1647.18 Nason had studied with the Amsterdam painter (and Rembrandt’s neighbor) Nicolaes Eliasz Pickenoy, and set up his own studio in The Hague sometime in the late 1630s. Although now regarded as a minor figure in the history of art, he was able to secure some major commissions, including portraits of Charles II of England and an imaginary group portrait of four generations of Princes of Orange. In the painting of Descartes, a gloved hand emerges from the philosopher’s black cape to grasp the painted oval frame around him. Although Descartes was in The Hague from time to time and the portrait could be from life, there is no documented connection between Nason and Descartes or any of Descartes’s acquaintances, and no evidence that Descartes actually sat for Nason.19 In fact, the painting so resembles the engraving by Van Schooten that—assuming the painting’s 1647 dating is correct—it was possibly copied from it.20
This brings us, finally, to 1649, when Descartes is supposed to have sat for a painting so that, as Baillet says,21 Bloemaert might have his souvenir. But what became of the painting of Descartes made for the Haarlem priest? Where is it? And did Bloemaert in fact go to Frans Hals, his fellow Haarlemer, for this highly personal work?
FIGURE 17. Jan Lievens, Portrait of René Descartes, ca. 1647, drawing (Collection Groninger Museum)
The Royal Museum of Fine Art in Copenhagen owns two paintings attributed to Hals. One is a life-size, half-length portrait, on canvas, of an unidentified man. The other is a small (19 cm × 14 cm) oil painting on wood panel, said to be a portrait of Descartes (color plate 8).
FIGURE 18. Pieter Nason, Portrait of René Descartes, 1647 (Collection of Alfred and Isabel Bader)
While there have been a few scholarly naysayers over the decades about the artistic authenticity of this panel, the con-sensus among art historians and curators is that the painting is indeed by Hals.22 This determination is supported by stylistic analysis and informed connoisseurship. It is also what a reasonably experienced layperson viewing the painting might expect. The painting closely resembles other portraits by Hals in this period. The “rough” manner in which the paint is handled, the dark setting, the impressionistic rendering of details (especially clothes), even the pose of the sitter and the expression on his face, seem much like those of other late paintings. The burden of proof would seem to be on those who doubt that this is an authentic Hals.
FIGURE 19. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, c. 1660 (Mauritshuis, The Hague)
FIGURE 20. Frans Hals, Portrait of a Man, 1650–53 (State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg)
Is this picture a portrait of Descartes? Absolute mathematical certainty, of the kind Descartes sought for his science, is not to be had on this question. Still, there is no reason to doubt that it is Descartes depicted in the painting, and there are compelling circumstantial reasons to believe that it is. With one exception—the painting by Weenix—all of the other contemporary portraits that are supposed to be of Descartes, including the one that was produced by an artist-friend and further authenticated by a contemporary who also knew Descartes personally, seem to show the same man, and the portrait by Hals fits well in this family grouping.
Like the other paintings and drawings, the Hals portrait—done within the same five-year period, when Descartes was in his late forties to early fifties—depicts a man in middle age. He has shoulder-length dark hair, tousled with a slight part in the center. His moustache is neatly trimmed, and he has a small patch of beard just under his lower lip. There is a long, prominent nose and heavy-lidded eyes under dark, arching eyebrows. Except for the Weenix portrait, the man in all these works has a fairly thin, bony face. (As if all of this visual evidence were not enough, there is a print with text from the same period that, as we shall see, confirms that the Copenhagen panel is a portrait of Descartes.)
So, there is a portrait of Descartes by Hals—one that is very much like other Hals portraits from the late 1640s and 1650s—and it is now in Copenhagen (acquired at the end of the nineteenth century23). Is there any documented connection between this portrait and Bloemaert that would decisively establish that Bloemaert asked Hals to paint his friend and that this panel is the result? Unfortunately, there is not.
Baillet does not say that Bloemaert went to Hals for the work. And the most compelling argument on behalf of the thesis that he did ask Hals and that the Copenhagen panel is the result of that commission suffers from circularity. The Copenhagen painting is undated. It must have been painted by 1651 at the latest, because a reproduction of it is referred to in a defense of Cartesian philosophy published in February 1652.24 The precise 1649 dating so often provided for the panel derives only from the assumption that it was done at Bloemaert’s request, just before Descartes’s excursion to Sweden.25 So one could argue that this is the only known portrait of Descartes that is contemporaneous with his departure from the Netherlands and thus the only one that matches up with the chronology of Baillet’s story. But so argued, the 1649 dating is based on the assumption that Hals’s painting was done for Bloemaert, and so cannot be used in turn to prove that it was.
On the other hand, most of the other extant original portraits of Descartes—by Van Schooten, Weenix, and Nason—are dated well before Descartes was even contemplating a move to Sweden. Thus, they cannot have been done for the priest’s benefit on the eve of Descartes’s departure.
The dating of the Lievens drawing is less certain; scholars have placed it sometime between 1644 and 1649.26 It is possible that it was done just when Bloemaert wanted a portrait of the philosopher. Even more tantalizing is the fact that the probate inventory of Bloemaert’s estate, compiled by the notary Michel de Keyser, lists two tronyen, or small portraits, by Lievens in his art collection.27 They hung in his “groote camer,” the “great room.” Although no subject is provided for either tronie—if the sitter were identifiable, it would likely have been labeled a conterfeytsel—it is tempting to believe that one of these is the drawing of Descartes, and therefore that Lievens is the artist to whom Bloemaert went.
However, the inventory does not say whether the Lievens works in Bloemaert’s possession were drawings or paintings. Most likely they were paintings, given their prominent placement in the most important room in the house.28 Moreover, Lievens was living in Amsterdam in 1649, so the plausibility of this hypothesis rests on coming up with a connection at least between Lievens and Haarlem (and then to Bloemaert).29
The notary’s silence on just who, if anyone, is actually portrayed in Bloemaert’s Lievens pieces is especially telling. Descartes was arguably too well known at this point for his portrait to have gone unidentified. Indeed, the inventory also lists among Bloemaert’s art works “drie prenten van de kartes,” or “three prints of Descartes” (by unknown artists), that hung in the “blauwe camer” (“blue room”) that was Bloemaert’s study and bedroom. If one of the two Lievens tronyen in Bloemaert’s great room was the artist’s drawn portrait of Descartes, then the notary De Keyser and Cornelis van Campen, the executor of Bloemaert’s estate who assisted with the inventory, would, in light of the identified Descartes portraits in the bedroom, presumably also have recognized and noted it as such. (Of course, the local notary might have been unfamiliar with the world of contemporary philosophy, thus totally unaware of who Descartes was; his identification of the subject of the three prints in the study-bedroom as “de kartes” would then likely have been based on text in the prints identifying the sitter as Descartes. Even so, the notary or the executor should still have been able, on this basis, also to identify Descartes as the individual portrayed in one of the Lievens works in Bloemaert’s possession, were this the case.) Finally, if either Lievens tronie were a drawing of Descartes, it would accordingly have been hanging not on the wall of the great room but in the more intimate place with the three other Descartes prenten.30
This means that the Hals portrait of Descartes—the oil painting in Copenhagen—is, of the extant portraits, the most likely candidate for the work in Baillet’s narrative. Other theories are possible, of course: that there was—and perhaps is, somewhere (hidden away in an attic?)—yet another painting of Descartes by Hals or by some other Haarlem artist that Bloemaert commissioned. Maybe the portrait sought by Bloemaert, from whatever artist, is long lost. But until some evidence of such a lost work materializes, the Hals oil painting remains the best, perhaps the only, contender. Besides, if what Bloemaert, an art collector who knew Haarlem’s painters well, wanted was a lifelike commemorative portrait of his friend, to whom else would he turn except the local artist renowned for his skill in painting portraits naer het leven?
Descartes almost certainly did sit for Hals for this portrait. While it is conceivable that what Hals did for Bloemaert was either copy some other image on hand or create something from his imagination guided by Bloemaert’s memory, this does not seem likely.31 Baillet’s description of Bloemaert’s urgency in “not [letting] Descartes leave without taking the liberty of having him captured by a painter” all but implies that the priest had the painting done from life. While Baillet often takes liberties in what is essentially a hagiography of the philosopher, there is no particular reason for doubting his word on this point. It was easy for Descartes to get to Haarlem—he had been doing it for years, to visit his friends—and it could not have been much trouble for Bloemaert, familiar as he was with Haarlem’s art world, to arrange a sitting. Given the speed with which Hals was apparently capable of working—after all, he is supposed to have painted Van Dyck “in a short time,” according to Houbraken’s apocryphal story; and he reportedly told the members of the Amsterdam Crossbow Civic Guard that he would not need very much time to do their individual portraits for the group piece32—it would not have taken him very long to produce it.33 Working in his typically rough manner, eschewing a fine finish, he would have needed Descartes for but one or two sittings, just to capture the face. Neither artist nor philosopher would have been greatly inconvenienced by Bloemaert’s project.
The painting was made sometime that summer, perhaps as late as September, when Descartes finally embarked for Sweden. It must have been done before Descartes went to Amsterdam to settle some affairs and board the ship to Stockholm. From the difficulties arising over the unfulfilled commission from the Amsterdam militia company in 1633, it is clear that Hals did not like to travel to carry out his projects, not even to Amsterdam. So if the painting is from life and Descartes did pose for Hals, in all likelihood it was done in Haarlem when Descartes’s final departure from Egmond was imminent. Perhaps Descartes, who did not like to be inconvenienced, cared little for having his likeness drawn or painted—he was arrogant, but not vain—and Bloemaert might have had to do some coaxing to get his friend, who was busy preparing for his journey, to come to town one last time just for this purpose.
What remains uncertain is whether the extant small oil portrait of Descartes was intended by Bloemaert to be the ultimate product of his commission. Is that all that the priest wanted from Hals, or was there something more? The panel was in fact put to further artistic service. But was this a part of Bloemaert’s request, and, if so, what exactly did he have in mind?
An hypothesis proposed by some scholars is that the portrait in Copenhagen, quickly done, was intended merely as a preparatory study for a larger, more finished painting. For a long time, it was believed that the life-size canvas in the Louvre was that finished painting; but now that that work has been de-attributed (“d’après Hals”), it is considered only a painted copy—one of several—by an unknown artist. It was done either directly from Hals’s small painting, or from a larger, possibly life-size work by Hals, or perhaps even from a work by some other artist that was itself based on the Hals panel or on a larger Hals painting. However, if Hals did go on to make a larger, more finished portrait from this panel, it is long lost and not likely to turn up anytime soon.34 There is, therefore, no available evidence to support the idea that Hals intended (either at Bloemaert’s urging or on his own) to make a more polished portrait of Descartes on the basis of the Copenhagen portrait, the status of which would then essentially be downgraded to a sketch.
Moreover, the Copenhagen panel, as rough as it is, shows all the marks of being a finished work, not a preparatory study. It has the “hoogsels en diepsels” (“heights and depths”)—essentially white highlights and dark shadows conveyed by deep black accents (especially on Descartes’s cloak)—that Houbraken, writing about Hals’s technique, identifies as the characteristic final touches in his paintings.35
For those who nonetheless remain reluctant to see the small oil portrait, just because of its rough character, as an end in itself, there is another theory, one that may be more plausible than the “preparatory study” hypothesis. Perhaps the panel was intended all along to serve as the basis of a print. This was a common practice, as engravings after paintings were an inexpensive and easily reproducible means for disseminating an image. Many artists in the Renaissance and early modern period relied on engraved reproductions to show (and market) their work. As we have seen, this was something that Hals himself often did with his portraits of writers and other intellectuals, many of which were, like the Descartes panel, small oil paintings. (The paintings themselves would be kept for private use and handed down to family or friends or hung in an institution with which the subject was connected, while the prints served a wider public.)
As a matter of fact, less than one year after Hals painted his little portrait of Descartes, it was reproduced as an engraving by Jonas Suyderhoef (1613–1686). Suyderhoef was a Haarlem artist who often worked closely with Hals. There was also a family connection: Suyderhoef’s brother was married to Hals’s niece, the daughter of Hals’s brother Dirck. Over the years, Suyderhoef made numerous engravings of Hals’s paintings—sixteen, by one count.36 The small portrait of Samuel Ampzing that Hals painted around 1630 was engraved by Suyderhoef soon after its completion; so were Hals’s portraits of Theodore Schrevelius, Caspar Sibelius, and Jean de la Chambre, as well as his oil portrait of the painter Frans Post37—all close in size to the Descartes painting. The Hals-Suyderhoef team was prolific, and did not discriminate against sitters on philosophical grounds. Among the portraits done by Hals and engraved by Suyderhoef is one of the theologian Jacob Revius,38 Descartes’s archenemy in Leiden who led the charge against the heretical new philosophy. Above Revius’s head in the engraving is the motto “May the love of Christ be victorious.”
FIGURE 21. Jonas Suyderhoef, René Descartes, 1650 (engraving after Hals)
Incidentally, Suyderhoef’s print offers further confirmation that Hals did indeed paint a portrait of Descartes, as well as that the Copenhagen panel is of Descartes. The text on the engraving explicitly identifies the sitter as “Renatus Descartes, noble Frenchman, lord of Perron, Greatest Mathematician and Philosopher.” It also says that the work was “painted by F. Hals, engraved by J. Suyderhoef.” In the engraving, the image is shown in reverse from how it appears in the oil painting, but it is obviously the same representation of the same man, although in the print his position is now slightly turned toward the viewer. Is the work by “F. Hals” that Suyderhoef reproduced in the print the Copenhagen panel, as opposed to some other, now lost painting of Descartes by Hals? To this, the answer is: almost certainly.39
Perhaps, then, Bloemaert ultimately wanted an engraved print of his friend’s image. It would be a fine portable (and reproducible) keepsake. Engraved portraits with informative and laudatory mottos were a dignified way of keeping an individual’s visage in sight and commemorating his intellectual accomplishments. It may be that one of the “drie prenten van de kartes” owned by Bloemaert and that hung in the blauwe camer was the image that Suyderhoef made in 1651 after Hals’s painting. Perhaps even all three of them were.
And yet, the most plausible theory of all—especially given the finished state of the painting—is that Bloemaert’s request was not for a life-size, polished portrait, nor for an engraved print, but rather simply for that small oil portrait itself: an intimate, personal, and lovely memento in rich colors. As for the Suyderhoef print from a painting of Descartes by “F. Hals,” Hals (and Suyderhoef) must have realized that the painting, once translated into an engraving depicting a famous author, could profitably be put to other uses: for example, by publishers of Descartes’s writings. Despite its subsequent history as modello for engravings and painted copies, then, the small panel was probably commissioned by Hals’s impatient client for its own sake. A quickly done likeness in oil before Descartes left Holland is all that Father Bloemaert sought from the Haarlem master. The painting would be for Bloemaert’s private enjoyment; the print, done a short time later, would be for a larger audience.
One might think that such a small and modest painting is all that Bloemaert could afford from an artist of Hals’s stat-ure. In the 1630s, Hals was receiving sixty-six guilders for each full-length figure in the Amsterdam militia portrait.40 A full-size bust portrait of an individual would be somewhat cheaper, but not inexpensive—perhaps thirty-five to fifty guilders. This still would have been a considerable expense on a Catholic priest’s income. However, Bloemaert did not depend solely on his clerical wages for his livelihood. He was, in fact, independently wealthy, coming from a very well-off family, and so was not without significant resources, especially—in the light of his impressive collection of paintings and prints—for the buying of art. It is more likely that Descartes, with his impending departure, simply did not have the time or patience to sit for a larger, more polished portrait. If, as Baillet says, all that Bloemaert wanted was a souvenir for his own use, then the small, rough painting that Hals produced—cheaper and quicker than one of his more elaborate portraits—would have sufficed for that purpose. What Bloemaert got for his money was a fine portrait of his friend, one that we (like his contemporaries) can appreciate as having all the character and valued features typical of a late Hals.
So, is the painting of Descartes by Hals that now hangs in Copenhagen the one that is supposed to have been made for Bloemaert? We may never know for sure. There is no painting by Hals to be found among the works of art listed in Bloemaert’s probate inventory. This is not conclusive, however, since there may have been paintings owned by Bloemaert that did not make it into the inventory, either because the priest gave them away before his death or because they were secured by someone after his death but before the inventory was done. Take, for example, the half-length, life-size portrait of Bloemaert himself painted by Verspronck, done in 1658, one year before the priest’s death and later paid for (sixty guilders) by the executors of his estate. This work is not listed in the inventory. Bloemaert apparently gave it as a gift to the woman who was caring for him in his final illness (and whom he, in his testament, generously allowed to continue living in his house rent-free for up to three years after his death).41 Perhaps the Hals portrait of Descartes, whose known provenance goes back only to the late nineteenth century, was similarly left with someone before the inventory was made. (There is a “conterfeytsel met een swarte lyst”—“portrait with a black frame”—that is listed in the inventory without mention of artist or sitter, but this is not likely to be the Descartes painting. It is hard to believe that neither a Haarlem notary nor the executor of Bloemaert’s estate, who was a friend of the late priest, would have recognized and taken note of a work by Hals, the city’s greatest and most famous master.)
There are, then, good (if not absolutely indubitable) reasons for believing that the Copenhagen panel and the painting mentioned by Baillet are one and the same. If that panel is by Hals, as experts believe and the formalistic evidence strongly suggests; and if it is of Descartes, as seems clear; and if Hals painted only one portrait of Descartes; and if he did so at Bloemaert’s request, which it is reasonable to conclude; then yes, the small oil painting in Denmark once decorated Father Bloemaert’s rooms in Haarlem. What happened to that painting after the priest’s death—and why it is not among the possessions listed in his estate—must remain a mystery.
Descartes never returned to the Netherlands and his quiet retreat in Egmond. In fact, he did not survive his first Swedish winter. Queen Christina insisted on having her philosophy lessons before sunrise. All his life, Descartes was used to lying in bed at least to midmorning. Now, in a bitterly cold land where, he says, “men’s thoughts freeze in the winter just like the water,” he is being forced to rise at an ungodly hour and traipse in the frigid dark to the queen’s chambers to talk metaphysics and morals. In early February he caught pneumonia. He died a week later, on 11 February 1650, just several months after his arrival.
Descartes was a philosopher of high ambition and great hubris. His project was nothing less than to rebuild the structure of knowledge from the ground up, to replace the old intellectual paradigm and put the whole of science on a new, absolutely solid metaphysical foundation. While much of his thought is deeply indebted to prior traditions and he could not entirely break away from the categories and even the substance of Scholastic philosophy,42 Descartes, at least, saw himself as the first truly original and modern thinker.
This is a philosopher who dared to prove that, although God is an omnipotent and absolutely arbitrary being, beholden to no values or standards independent of His will, He nonetheless, in His infinite perfection, stands as guarantor to human reason; a philosopher who believed that through his divinely guaranteed rational faculty he was able to discover nature’s deepest secrets and arrive at explanations for “all the phenomena of nature”; and who derived, a priori and simply from a consideration of God’s essence, the laws of nature themselves. He also had the audacity to take on the most sacred mystery of the Catholic faith and, discarding centuries of fealty to a particular explanatory theory, reinterpret it on his own terms and consistent with modern science.
And yet, as ambitious and single-minded as Descartes was in the pursuit of his philosophical projects, he was not the aloof, solitary, and misanthropic genius that his contemporary critics and some later commentators have made him out to be. Far from shutting himself off from human contact in order to carry out his researches in rural isolation, Descartes had a broad and diverse circle of personal and professional acquaintances—French and Dutch; Catholic and Protestant; philosophers, mathematicians, scientists, diplomats, and theologians. It was, in fact, the warm, enjoyable company of two local priests that helped make the long northern winters somewhat tolerable for him. The musical evenings in Haarlem must also have provided Descartes with some comfort in the face of the harsh, often personal attacks from his many enemies, and temporary escape from the interminable battles over his philosophy that raged in the Dutch universities. Descartes was a man devoted to order—both in philosophy and in living—and averse to any disturbance in his routine. Thus, it was only with great reluctance that he gave up his quiet but sociable life in the Netherlands for a burdensome commission in an even colder climate.
Descartes’s departure was an especially sad event for one of those friends in Haarlem. As Descartes sailed away, Father Augustijn Bloemaert was more distraught than the philosopher’s other Dutch acquaintances. The priest was, however, able to find some consolation in a painting now decorating his home, a small panel (today hanging in the Royal Museum of Art in Copenhagen) that would keep alive the memory of his friend.
