Emanuel de Witte
(1617 - 1691) |
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Architectural Church Interiors, Seascapes Art Work
| Name: |
Emanuel de Witte |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
Alkmaar |
| Nationality: |
Netherlander |
| Birth: |
1617 |
| Death: |
1691 |
| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
Architectural Church Interiors, Seascapes |
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| Style: |
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| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Painter
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Biography
| Best known as one of Delft's most talented painters of church interiors, Emanuel de Witte was, in fact, a versatile artist who also tackled such diverse subjects as histories, portraits, harbor scenes, and genre themes featuring market scenes or quiet interiors. His interior domestic scenes are recognized as being among the finest, most reflective images of seventeenth-century Holland. Though little is known about his life, the de Witte described by Houbraken* had a difficult personality, who found life bitter and ended it with suicide. He was born at Alkmaar and reportedly first trained in Delft with the still-life painter Evert van Aelst. In 1636 de Witte was again living in Alkmaar and was a member of its painters' guild. In July 1639 he was reportedly living in Rotterdam at the declared age of twenty-three; he lived there until 1640. By 1641 he was back in Delft, where he was active for the next ten years. In 1641 his first daughter was baptized there, and in 1642 he joined the city's painters' guild, married the mother of his child, and had a second daughter in 1646. We find references to de Witte in documents from 1644 to 1650. In early 1652 he is reported living in Amsterdam, and in 1654 he traveled to Haarlem to serve as an appraiser with the Everdingens,* later returning to Amsterdam. Widowed, de Witte remarried in 1655, and records in Amsterdam mention him frequently during the next seventeen years. In 1658 he received a commission from the king of Denmark. Two years later, his financial situation had so declined that he indentured himself to an Amsterdam notary, who was to receive all of de Witte's future paintings in exchange for room and board and 800 guilders per year. Legal disputes followed that arrangement, and de Witte's financial situation apparently never improved. His difficulties were so desperate that his wife set a daughter to stealing; the girl was quickly caught and punished. Houbraken states that de Witte took his own life in 1692, and he was fished out of a canal with a rope around his neck eleven weeks after he disappeared – broken-spirited and poverty-stricken. De Witte's first known efforts were mythologies. His earliest dated works, a Dana? (dated 1641, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) and a Vertumnus and Pomona (dated 1644, also Rotterdam), reflect some contact with painters in Utrecht. Several small portraits painted during this decade (see the examples in Rotterdam) demonstrate his study of Ter Borch.* De Witte's first dated church painting is the Old Church (dated 1651, London, Wallace Collection) and is considered one of the finest examples of Delft church painting. Unusually large, filled with people who play an exceptionally dominant role, the work anticipates de Witte's later development, both as a genre painter and as a painter of interiors. Interestingly, de Witte produced most of his church interiors in Amsterdam, where he was the only painter known to treat that subject. Inspired by the Old Church, the New Church, and the Portuguese Synagogue of Amsterdam (built in 1671-75), de Witte painted actual church interiors quite rarely, preferring imaginary interiors of Gothic or Renaissance churches, or combining various elements from known churches to make up a fictivc interior. De Witte's development in the 1650s has been described as a search for new compositions, while his evolution in the 1660s concerned itself increasingly with light to suggest space and to create a poetic, evocative mood. Unlike many other practitioners of architectural scenes, de Witte seems to have used an intuitive rather than systematic approach to perspective. No dated works appear after 1688. In the 1660s de Witte also began to introduce new subjects, such as his open-air market scenes. The Fish Market (dated 1672, Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen) is a particularly notable example for its mingling of narrative, still-life, and landscape elements with portraiture. De Witte's Interior with a Woman at a Clavichord (Rotterdam, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen), of about five years earlier, shows his ability to create just the opposite mood – here time and the momentary are suspended, a specifically described space is transformed into an archetype, the figure who plays music is the perfect analogue to the various squares that knit the composition into a symphonic whole. Ironically it is the Fish Market that reverberates with sound while the Interior with Woman at a Clavichord is oddly silent. In all, de Witte is celebrated for his ability to convey a sense of light, poetic stillness and tonality. In the best of his works he has been compared with Carel Fabritius* and Jan Vermeer,* and his inventiveness has been ranked with the imaginative power of Holland's greatest masters. |
Samples of Work
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