Artist: Huijgh Pietersz Voskuijl
Date: 1640
Size: 122 x 89 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
The couple Philips Denijs (shown here) and Geertruyd Reael (see SK-A-2369) shown in these pendant portraits had been married 15 years when Voskuyl immortalized them. Philips Denijs was the second son of Pieter Denijs, an enterprising businessman from London, and Elisabeth Noblet, who hailed from Antwerp.5 Pieter Denijs began his career as a maker of ivory combs, and later imported civet cats for the yellowish musky-odoured substance found in the pouch near their sexual organs that was used in the manufacture of perfumes and medicine. In 1620, he purchased the brewery ‘Het Rode Hert’, which he gave to his son Philips at the time of his wedding on 30 November 1625. In addition to operating this brewery, Philips Denijs was a member of the dike board of Watergraafsmeer. Geertruyd Reael was four years older than her husband.6 Her father, Jacob Laurensz Reael, was a merchant on the Damrak in the ‘Gouden Reael’, and, from 1606, secretary of the Admiralty of Amsterdam. Philips Denijs and Geertruyd Reael had at least eight children, three of whom died in infancy. In the evening of 21 September 1652, the couple had their will drawn up as Geertruyd lay sick in bed. She died not long afterwards and was buried in the Westerkerk on 2 October 1652.7 Philips Denijs lived more than a decade longer and was buried on 16 April 1666. Voskuyl has portrayed the couple standing and at three-quarter length against neutral backgrounds. The table shown in both portraits serves as a unifying motif. If Voskuyl intended the diagonal shadow extending from the centre left in Geertruyd Reael’s portrait to be a continuation of the shadow in the upper right corner of her husband’s portrait, the pendants were meant to be hung some distance from each other. Jonathan Bikker, 2007 See Bibliography and Rijksmuseum painting catalogues See Key to abbreviations and Acknowledgements This entry was published in J. Bikker (ed.), Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century in the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, I: Artists Born between 1570 and 1600, coll. cat. Amsterdam 2007, no. 328.
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