Artist: Nicolaes Jacobsz Van Der Heck
Date: 1636
Size: 57 x 98 cm
Technique: Oil On Panel
Were it not signed and dated, it would be difficult to conceive that this Witches’ Sabbath was executed by an Alkmaar painter in 1636. While the monsters and demons are drawn from the repertoire of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the panoramic landscape with classical ruins resembles the work of Flemish artists active in Rome at the turn of the 16th century, such as Paulus Bril and Willem van Nieulandt II. The scene is presided over by a crowned demon in the form of a gigantic frog seated on a globe on a pedestal. Worshipping figures kneel before the pedestal. In the right foreground, other figures accompanied by cats, a priest and a sphinx-like creature, are shown kneeling in worship before candles. A procession of sorcerers occupies the centre foreground. Their number includes a woman with flayed arms riding a beast with multiple heads reminiscent of the creature on which the Whore of Babylon rides (Revelation 17:3). This parallel was probably intentional, as the Whore of Babylon was used to represent false religion – in an emblem by Alciato, for example.5 On the ruin on the left, a witch washes the back of a naked woman and another stirs a cauldron. More witches are shown flying in the sky around the obelisk, on the pedestal of which a demonic creature bares his buttocks, another blows a horn, and a third urinates into the open mouth of a creature sprawled out beneath the obelisk. There are three other paintings by Van der Heck with compositions almost identical to that of the Rijksmuseum painting, which is dated 1636. One is in Châteauroux and is dated 1635.6 The other two were probably also executed in the 1630s. A version auctioned in Brussels in 1947 differs from the others in that it shows the Egyptian St Antony the Great in the lower left corner kneeling before an altar while being tempted by the devil in the guise of a woman.7 In the three other versions, including the one in the Rijksmuseum, St Antony has been replaced by figures in contemporary dress seated at a table making music and drinking. Van der Heck was apparently fascinated by the themes of the witches’ sabbath and the temptation of St Antony throughout his career. From early 20th-century descriptions we know of two other paintings by him of the temptation of St Antony, one dated 1630 and the other 1649, that is towards the end of his career.8 Based on these descriptions, the 1630 painting probably resembled the Rijksmuseum panel, while that of 1649 was probably the one that was photographed around 1950 when it was in a private Dutch collection.9 The composition of that painting is completely different from the Rijksmuseum’s, and shows that Van der Heck had probably seen one of David Teniers the Younger’s many treatments of the theme. In a work in Brussels that is dated 1624, Van der Heck handled the theme of the witches’ sabbath in much the same way as in his paintings from the 1630s.10 On the basis of the Brussels painting it is possible to attribute to Van der Heck a Temptation of St Antony that was at auction in 1960 as the work of Paulus Bril.11 According to a note written by Max Friedländer on a photograph of the painting preserved in the RKD, the work was dated 1601.12 If the painting was indeed dated 1601, it would be Van der Heck’s earliest known work, which would mean that he painted his first Temptation of St Antony at the very beginning of his career. The basic composition of the 1636 Rijksmuseum painting, with such features as a ruin on the left and an obelisk, was already established in that painting. Also present there, as well as in the versions of 1624 and the 1630s, is a circle of figures dancing in front of an archway on the right. Like the latter works, the earliest one includes flying figures, but not the witches of the Rijksmuseum painting. Rather, St Antony is shown being plagued by demons in the manner of Martin Schongauer’s famous print. 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. 115.
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