Judith Leyster possessed a remarkable ability to capture the personalities of her sitters, especially of children. In this small tondo, painted on panel, a boy seen in strict profile gazes thoughtfully outside the picture plane. The gentle curves of his cheeks and button nose suggest that he is no more than 10 years old, but his alert stare and stoic pose convey a seriousness and maturity well beyond his years—a perfect encapsulation of the innocence and oftentimes precociousness of youth.
Despite his quiet demeanor, the young boy possesses an extraordinary liveliness and immediacy, which is owed largely to Leyster’s energetic brush and vivid palette. She modeled his round cheeks and plump lips in fluid sweeps of rose that add the ruddy blush of childhood to his creamy complexion. Touches of brown above his head create the sensation that a few wisps of his soft locks have yet to come to rest. Delicate strokes across his eyelids and eyelashes convey a flickering sense of movement that brings life to the boy’s youthful visage. Finally, Leyster used some sort of firm tool, perhaps the back of the brush, to scratch fine strands of hair into the wet paint to reveal the light ground below. Leyster used this same scratching technique to render strands of hair in Last Drop [fig. 1]
[fig. 1] Judith Leyster, Last Drop, c. 1630–1631, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, which she also executed around 1630–1631.
Given her evident facility with portraiture, it is remarkable that Leyster only rarely painted portraits. Aside from this work, only two other portraits are known: her Self-Portrait of about 1630 and a 1635 portrait of a woman in the Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem. In both, the sitter’s confident gaze and beguiling smile demonstrate Leyster’s capacity to create the impression of a moment arrested in time. Leyster learned to capture this feeling of spontaneity from the greatest portraitist of the day, Frans Hals (Dutch, c. 1582/1583 - 1666), in whose studio she apparently worked in the late 1620s. Her vibrant palette and lively brushwork owe much to Hals’ guidance and inspiration.
Initially, it would seem that Young Boy in Profile also relates directly to Hals’ influence, to his depictions of children smiling impishly out at the viewer, drinking or playing music [fig. 2]
[fig. 2] Frans Hals, Drinking Boy, c. 1626, oil on panel, Staatliches Museum, Schwerin. Photo: Gabriele Broecker. But, these engaging, small panel paintings from the 1620s are tronies, or character studies, and they belong to a different pictorial tradition than Leyster’s quiet profile, which has all the characteristics of a portrait.
The profile pose of the young boy derives from a classicizing artistic tradition unconnected to Frans Hals. In Haarlem, Frans de Grebber (1573–1649), who, according to Samuel Ampzing, gave Leyster her earliest instruction, espoused, along with Salomon de Bray (1597–1664), a distinctly classicizing style that they hoped would elevate Dutch painting to the luster of antiquity. Much like Leyster’s small tondo, De Bray’s Young Woman in Profile of 1636 relates to ancient Roman coins, cameos, and medals in its strict profile orientation. In Leiden, Jan Lievens (Dutch, 1607 - 1674) painted and etched a number of figures in profile, young and old alike, which may have been known to Leyster. In his Young Girl in Profile, c. 1631, Lievens, like Leyster, scratched into the wet paint to indicate the wisps of the girl’s hair. Although the pensive, downcast eyes of Lievens’ model indicate that this painting is a tronie—it was explicitly described as a tronie in an inventory of 1641—it and its related etching, Young Girl with Long Hair of c. 1628–1631 provide a further pictorial context for Leyster’s painting.
Leyster may have chosen this classicistic pose to reflect the status of this sitter, which may have been elevated to judge from the delicately painted lovelock and refined attire. The lovelock, a tress of hair worn long and to the left of the face, was said to have been introduced at the Parisian court in the early seventeenth century by Honoré d’Albert (1581–1649), marshall of France, lord of Cadanet, and duke of Chaulnes. The style became particularly fashionable among the nobility in France, England, and Germany, although it never attained widespread popularity in the northern Netherlands. Aside from a few Dutchmen and foreign officers at The Hague in the circle of the Prince of Orange and the exiled king of Bohemia, Frederick V, elector Palatine of the Rhine (1596–1632), few examples of men (or children) sporting the coif are known.
Aside from his hairstyle, the boy’s outfit also has courtly associations. The gold-and-black piping on his plum-colored doublet resembles a decorative feature of the livery and page uniforms worn at court in The Hague. The small, white, linen ruff differs from the unstarched ruffs or flat, rectangular collars fashionable for children at that time, and reflects a more formal, late sixteenth-century style of dress.
Arthur K. Wheelock Jr.
April 24, 2014
