Artist: Samuel Dirksz Van Hoogstraten
Date: 1630
Size: 71 x 55 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
Also known in English by its German name, Anna Selbdritt, such depictions as the present painting show three generations of the Holy Family. The bunch of grapes Anna offers the Christ Child is a Eucharistic symbol, and refers to Mary as the vine on which the grapes (Christ) grew. The figures are shown in an ordinary domestic interior. The curtain behind Mary, while not seeming out of place, functions as a rather modest cloth of honour. The mirror, with a small broom appended to it, hanging next to the window is probably a reference to Mary’s Immaculate Conception.9 The notion, first advanced by Hofstede de Groot, that Van Hoogstraten’s painting was influenced by Italian models is incorrect.10 The painting was much more probably based on northern Renaissance depictions of the Virgin and Child or Anna Selbdritt, or both, which are typically situated in domestic interiors. Van Hoogstraten seems to have deliberately given his picture an archaic look. The Virgin’s smoothly modelled features and disproportionately large head recall her depictions in 15th- and 16th-century Flemish painting. The myriad angular drapery folds also puts one in mind of earlier northern art. On the other hand, but perhaps unintentionally, the head of the Christ Child has a Rubensesque quality. The similarities a number of scholars have seen between Dirk van Hoogstraten’s Virgin and Child with St Anne and his son Samuel’s later, ‘classicizing’ work, the Annunciation of the Death of the Virgin in particular, are not readily apparent to the present author.11 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. 150.
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