| Called a good representative of portraiture in Holland around mid-century, Verspronck was also the leading portrait artist in Haarlem along with Frans Hals. Though he adopted Hals's compositional devices in group portraits, Verspronck never attempted Hals's daring painterly and spontaneous use of his medium. A gifted and insightful observer, Verspronck consistently produced accurate, lively, and convincingly modeled studies of his sitters' heads, and he had a special knack for rendering ruffs, drapery, and other fabrics. His most appealing portraits are those of children, of which the Portrait of a Girl in a Blue Dress (signed and dated 1641, Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum) is one of his most celebrated. Verspronck also had commissions for numerous group portraits, of which his depiction of the Regentesses of St. Elizabeth s Hospital, Haarlem (signed and dated the same year as his Portrait of a Girl) is considered his masterpiece. Few documents outline Verspronck's career. Theodoras Schrevelius is the only contemporary historian (1648) to mention him, and he causes great confusion by calling him Gerard Sprong. We know that Johannes was the son of the painter Cornells Engelsz (born in Gouda ca. 1574/5) and that he studied with his father. Most sources give 1597 as the year of Verspronck's birth, but that date has been deduced from a painting called a self-portrait (dated 1643), which gives the age of the sitter. Scholars now think Verspronck was born about ten years later (ca. 1606-9). Verspronck's early work is so close to that of Frans Hals that it has been suggested that he spent time in Hals's workshop. Established in the Haarlem St. Luke's Guild in 1632, he evidently never married and lived quietly (as well as frugally) in his parents* house for years. He saved considerable sums of money, some of which we know he lent to relatives. In 1656 he was able to afford a fine house on the Jansstraat, which he shared with his siblings. Dated paintings by Verspronck are known from 1634 to 1658. He died toward the end of June 1662 and was buried in the St. Bavo church on 30 June. Johannes is considered the counterpart to his fellow Haarlemmer Bartholomeus van der Heist (1613-70), but unlike van der Heist, Johannes never left Haarlem, nor did he attempt to flatter his sitters. Van der Heist, who settled in Amsterdam by 1636, responded to van Dyck's Flemish manner, endowing his subjects with a flourish and elegance distinct from the honest and pragmatic view of humanity generally adopted by Verspronk. |
