Jan Hermansz. van Bijlert (1597 – Utrecht – 1671)

Madonna and Child

Datable to circa 1625-30
oil on panel
41 x 30 ⅝ inches (105 x 78 cm.)

Provenance:
Baroness Sigrid Rålamb, Stockholm, 1912, as unknown Flemish master;
Friherre Rålamb, Stockholm, 1934;
Hägglöf collection, Stockholm;
Generalkonsul Söderberg, Stockholm, 1958;
Barbo Stigsdottir;
sale, Bukowski, Stockholm, 15 November 1975, p. 994, illustrated, as French School, 17th century;
With Leger Galleries, London (Exhibition of Old Master Paintings, April 1976, no. 16, pl. XIII);
Private Collection, Canada;
sale, Sotheby’s, New York, 4 July 1980, lot 142;
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Morton B. Harris, New York.

Exhibited:
New York, National Academy of Design, Dutch and Flemish Paintings from New York Private Collections, 1988, catalogue by Ann Jensen Adams, p. 36, no. 4, and p. 20, fig. 4, illustrated (lent by Mr. and Mrs. Morton B. Harris);
Greenwich, Bruce Museum, Pleasures of Collecting: Part I, Renaissance to Impressionist Masterpieces, 21 September 2002 – 5 January 2003, catalogue by Peter C. Sutton, p. 16 and p. 69.

Literature:
Otto Granberg, Trésors d’art en Suède, vol. 2, 1912, p. 312, fig. 65, as unknown Flemish master;
Arthur von Schneider, Caravaggio und die Niederländer, 1933, p. 132, as Jan van Bijlert;
G.J. Hoogewerff, “Jan van Bylert, Schilder van Utrecht (1598-1671)”, in Oud Holland, vol. 80, 1965, p. 24, no. 7;
Benedict Nicolson, The International Caravaggesque Movement, 1979, p. 27;
Rüdiger Klessmann, in the exhibition catalogue, Die holländischen Gemälde, Herzog Anton Ulrich-Museum, Braunschweig, 1983, pp. 42-43; 
Benedict Nicolson, Caravaggism in Europe (revised edition by L. Vertova), 1989, p. 70, fig. 1338;
Paul Huys Janssen, Jan van Bijlert, 1998, p. 27, color plate III, and pp. 97-98, no. 12. 

The following text is cited from Pleasures of Collecting: Part I, Renaissance to Impressionist Masterpieces exhibition catalogue, Bruce Museum, 2002.

Son of a glass engraver and the pupil of Abraham Bloemart, Jan van Bijlert was one of the Dutch painters known as the Utrecht Caravaggisti.  Like Gerard van Honthorst and Hendrik ter Brugghen, he was born in Utrecht and traveled to Italy, where he was influenced by the revolutionary Baroque master, Caravaggio.  The Utrecht Caravaggisti absorbed the Italian painter’s realism, half-length, life-size compositions and taste for genre subjects, but combined these with a clearer, more silvery light and brighter palette. 

Although the present work is not dated, Paul Huys Janssen has characterized it as one of the painter’s masterpieces and the earliest of a series of half-length images of the Virgin and Child and related allegories of Caritas (another subject featuring a mother with infants) which van Bijlert began in the 1630s.¹ 

When the painting was exhibited in New York in 1988, Ann Adams observed that the Madonna’s graceful pose in holding the Christ Child to her side recalls her counterpart in Caravaggio’s famous Madonna of the Rosary (Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna), which surprisingly was already in Amsterdam by 1617, in the collection of the artist Louis Finson, into whose family van Bijlert’s daughter later married.  However, Janssen has correctly observed that the theme and composition of the present work are more typical of French Caravaggists, specifically Simon Voet, than of the Dutch.  Van Bijlert traveled to Italy via France and may have made a second trip to Paris in the 1630s when he could have been influenced by a series of half-length images of the Madonna and Child in which Voet specialized.  In this connection, it may be significant that van Bijlert’s pupil, Abraham Willaerts, went on to study under Vouet.