Portrait of Lubbert Gerritsz (1535-1612), Michiel Jansz van Mierevelt (workshop of), after c. 1607 – (Michiel Jansz Van Mierevelt) ◄ Previous Next ►

Artist: Michiel Jansz Van Mierevelt

Date: 1607

Technique: Oil On Panel

Lubbert Gerritsz, a linen weaver by profession, joined the Mennonite community in his native Amersfoort in 1556. Three years later, he fled to Hoorn, where he became an elder in the hardline ‘Flemish’ Mennonite community. Later he became the teacher of the moderate Mennonite faction, the ‘Young Frisians’, first in Hoorn and after 1589 in Amsterdam, where he succeeded in bringing about peace between his community and the so-called ‘High Germans’. In 1593, the ‘Waterlanders’ of Amsterdam joined this group of united Mennonite communities.4 This is a studio replica of a bust-length portrait of Lubbert Gerritsz dated 1607 and inscribed: ‘Ætatis 73’.5 The attribution of the original to Van Mierevelt is confirmed by the inscription on Willem Jacobsz Delff’s 1612 engraving after it.6 The circular replica shows less of Lubbert Gerritsz’s body than the rectangular original, and there is less space above the sitter’s head. The rather rough handling of the replica differs greatly from Van Mierevelt’s precise, finely executed original. Two portraits of Lubbert Gerritsz, both described as ‘copies’, are listed in the inventory of Van Mierevelt’s shop drawn up after the painter’s death in 1641.7 Significantly, one of those so-called copies was circular (‘een rondeken’) and might, therefore, have been the Rijksmuseum painting. 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. 191.