Group Portrait (Four Officers of the Amsterdam Coopers’ and Wine-rackers’ Guild) by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout was created in 1657. The painting is in National Gallery London. The size of the work is 163 x 197 cm and is made of oil on canvas.
About the Work
This group portrait shows the officers of the Coopers‘ and Wine-rackers’ guild of Amsterdam, which included men who made barrels for the wine imported into the city and those who sampled and bottled it. The name of the guild is written on the seal which hangs over the edge of the table, while in the background is a painting of Saint Matthias, patron saint of coopers, holding an axe. The adze and broad axe carved in the frame were the tools used by coopers to make barrels.
The sitters are named on the document lying on the table: Philips van der Neer, Jan van den Eeckhout, Tomas Hendrick and Jan Hendrick. We don’t know which is which, but Jan van den Eeckhout was the painter’s brother and is probably one of the younger men – he was 37 or 38 years old when this portrait was made.
Group pictures like this – representing the leading figures of trade guilds and military companies, and the trustees or governors of schools, orphanages and hospitals – were very common in seventeenth-century Dutch art. They represented a formal record of those who held office at that moment and would hang on the walls of the guild’s hall or offices. They were usually all male groups, but some women did appear, especially in charitable institutions. Read more in National Gallery London
About the Artist
Gerbrand van den Eeckhout (19 August 1621 – 29 September 1674) was a Dutch Golden Age painter and a favourite student of Rembrandt. He was also an etcher, an amateur poet, a collector and an adviser on art.
Gerbrand was born in Amsterdam, the son of a jeweller, a Mennonite who fled after 1585 from Antwerp to the north. In 1631 his mother died. His father’s second wife was Cornelia Dedel, the daughter of a founder of the Delft chamber of the Dutch East India Company.
Arnold Houbraken records Van den Eeckhout was a pupil of Rembrandt. A fellow pupil to Ferdinand Bol, Nicolaes Maes and Govert Flinck, but regarded as inferior to them in skill and experience; he soon assumed Rembrandt’s manner with such success that his pictures were confused with those of his master. Read more in Wikipedia
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