Searching for Hendrick Meulenaer
Two intriguing portraits by Rembrandt's pupil Nicolaas Maes are featured in 'Portraits from Rembrandt's World'. At first sight the portraits of the unknown man and woman seem not to belong together. Yet the two have been paired since 1905. Were they original pendants or were they brought together later? Who were they in fact? These and other questions seemed quite unanswerable.
A puzzle. For almost a century, the man and woman in Nicolaas Maes's portraits have been paired: they had been purchased together by Frederik Muller in Amsterdam in 1905. But had they been together before that? The clothes and hairstyle suggest that Maes painted them both around 1675. So it's possible. But there's something not quite right. The man and the woman in the portraits are not looking at each other. This got us thinking. If only we could find out who these people were. Then we might be able to solve the puzzle.
Unfortunately, portrait experts and historians were unable to identify either the man or the woman. There was no coat of arms and no inscription. No records existed of the provenance before 1905 or of the families that had owned the paintings. In fact there was hardly anything to go on.
But quite unexpectedly, a breakthrough came. An excited restorer phoned up with the news that, having removed the old canvas backing, he had uncovered a name on the reverse of the original canvas: Hendrick Meulenaer/son of/Roelof Meulenaer and Maria Rey/born 5 April 1650/died 7 Jan... 1704/....1676 /.../. The hunt was on.
Searching for Hendrick Meulenaer
The first step in our search for Hendrick Meulenaer involved a visit to the Iconographic Bureau in The Hague, a documentation centre for everything connected with Dutch portraits. The name Meulenaar did indeed occur. But there was unfortunately no reference to a portrait of Hendrick Meulenaer. A portrait of Marten Meulenaer, son of Roelof Meulenaer and Maria Rey was mentioned, however. This was presumably a brother of Hendrick. In fact, this painting had been painted by Nicolaas Maes and is now at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It is dated 1675. Indeed, a comparison of the portraits of the two brothers suggests that they may be pendants.
Meulenaer family
So now we needed to find out more about the Meulenaer family and our Hendrick. For this we went to another institute in The Hague, the Central Genealogical Bureau which specialises in family history. We were in luck: here we discovered that Hendrick Meulenaer was the oldest son of Roelof Meulenaer, postmaster in Antwerp, and Maria Rey. He had been born on 5 April 1650 in Amsterdam. In 1672 he is mentioned as a grocer, later as a merchant. Eventually, he was to become director of Levantine Trade, an important post in the commercial capital of Amsterdam. On 3 March 1676 Hendrick married the daughter of a merchant, Alida Wijnands. Two children resulted from the marriage, but sadly, this branch of the family died out in the next generation. Hendrick himself died in Amsterdam on 7 January 1704.
Wife or sister
This information offered more hope for an identification of the woman in the other portrait by Nicolaes Maes, who had been Hendrick Meulenaer's companion since 1905 - but perhaps even longer. Could this be Hendrick's wife, Alida? At the Iconographic Bureau research into the subject had continued. The director, Karen Schaffers, had stumbled on a portrait of a unknown man - unknown until now that is, because she recognised the face as being that of Hendrick Meulenaer. This turned out to be a copy of the Hendrick by Nicolaas Maes. Even more interesting, this was accompanied by a pendant which surely had to be Hendrick's wife, Alida Wijnands. It was a spectacular find, but it did not really help us. This was obviously not the same person as the woman accompanying our Meulenaer.
Who was she then? To judge from the fashion and the hairstyle, the portrait could be dated to around 1675. That was the year Maes had also painted the portrait of Marten Meulenaer. Perhaps the artist had been commissioned to portray all the children of Roelof Meulenaer and Maria Rey and this young women was therefore one of Hendrick and Marten sisters - Maria, who was born in 1658, or Anna, born in 1661. Nothing has as yet come to light concerning their lives.
Amsterdam family
In fact, the family continued to flourish via Hendrick's daughter Maria Meulenaer. She married Pieter Schout Muilman. Their last descendent was a woman whose only heir was a stepson, Jhr J.S.H. van de Poll. He wished to keep the memory of the Meulenaer dynasty alive and bequeathed a large collection of paintings to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1880. These works included portraits of Hendrick Meulenaer's forebears. Clearly the most intriguing is Ferdinand Bol's portrait of Elisabeth Bas: she became famous through the cigars that bore her name. The famous equestrian portrait of Pieter Schout by Thomas de Keyzer was also part of the legacy, along with the aforementioned portrait by Nicolaas Maes of Marten Meulenaer. And this Marten, as we now know, was the brother of Hendrick Meulenaar, where the story first started.