Pieter van der Werff was the younger and lesser-known brother of the highly esteemed Chevalier Adriaen van der Werff. He started as a pupil and assistant of his six years older brother. By the middle of the 1690s his brother, who was so successful and internationally committed, left him, graciously, the local Rotterdam market, for which Pieter produced a fair number of portraits. Our painting is definitely superior to most of his rather uninspired serial production.

 

 

Dutch painter

Kralingen-Ambacht (Rotterdam) 1665 – 1722 Rotterdam

 

Painter of portraits, genre scenes and history paintings.

 

Younger brother, pupil and assistant of the famous painter Adriaen van der Werff (1659 – 1722), who was internationally acclaimed for his precise, classicising genre scenes and portraits. Both brothers died in 1722: our Pieter the 24th of September, his brother Adriaen the 12th of November.

 

Pieter married in 1694 with Maria Bosman, who had also been a pupil of his brother. She already passed away in 1700; the couple had one daughter, Elisabeth. Shortly after her death Pieter and Elisabeth moved in with Adriaen.

 

Our painter was Dean of the Painter’s Guild of Rotterdam between 1703 and 1716. His brother Adriaen had been Dean between 1691 and 1695.

 

Johan van Gool  describes in his “Nieuwe Schouburg der Nederlantsche Kunstschilders en Schilderessen” (1750/51, holding 190 biographies) how both brothers, Adriaen and Pieter, worked together: our Pieter would assist his better-known, six years older brother, while Adriaen would improve some of Pieter’s paintings. 

 

After circa 1695 Adriaen painted less portraits himself, because of his international success. That left the local Rotterdam market open for Pieter, who painted for example between 1696 and 1698 a series of 30 oval portraits for the Rotterdam chamber of the East Indies Company. Stylistically he stayed indebted to his brother.

 

 

Our Late Baroque portrait testifies of the overwhelming influence of French classicising culture in European art around 1700: this well-educated, well-dressed man, wearing a fashionable long (and thus expensive) wig stands in front of a mountainous Arcadian landscape with classical references. In fact it was King Louis XIV of France who ‘started’ this fashion by wearing a wig, because of his thinning hair.

 

Pieter van der Werff painted an important number of portraits on oval canvasses. Why? Time management: in an oval composition you can cut away the background landscape and very often also a hand. Clearly our painter has put a lot of effort in painting this portrait, including a beautiful well-manicured hand, a securely draped orange-red coat and a fascinating, detailed landscape.

 

 

Because this well executed, fully signed and dated portrait surpasses the average serial work of our painter and of many of his colleagues.