Ferdinand Bol (Dordrecht 1616-1680 Amsterdam)

This powerful and emotive portrait is a masterpiece in the oeuvre of Ferdinand Bol, Rembrandt's most famous pupil. After leaving Rembrandt's studio around 1641, Bol built a successful career painting portraits and history pictures in a dramatic, tenebrous style strongly influenced by that of his master. His dated works span nearly three decades – including prestigious public and private commissions in Amsterdam, Gouda, Leiden, and Utrecht – and earned him the praise of the poet Jan Vos in 1654. In 1655 he served as governor of the painter's guild and the year after completed the monumental Fabritius and Pyrrhus for the Burgomasters' Chamber in the new Amsterdam Town Hall; his students appear to have included Cornelis Bisschop (1630-1674) and Godfrey Kneller (1646-1723).

Depicted in a magnificent crimson gown with a gold mantle, adorned with a pearl necklace, earrings, and a pearled ornament in her hair, and carrying a sword with an elaborately designed hilt, the striking figure in the present work wears a sly smile across her lips and an unmistakably shrewd look in her eyes, evoking authority and confidence. Her features and noble demeanor have led scholars to tentatively identify the sitter as Princess Marie-Louise Gonzaga de Nevers, the second wife of King Wladislav IV Vasa, king of Poland, grand duke of Lithuania, and czar of Russia. She was crowned queen in Poland in 1646 in the Royal Basilica of Cracow, after having traveled from her native Paris with an extravagant retinue of one hundred carriages. During her trip, she spent four days in December in Amsterdam, where she was received by leading poets and writers and given a reception befitting a future queen. A picture of the Princess in full-length formal wedding garb, commissioned from Justus van Egmont just before her departure from Paris (Museum Narodwe, Warsaw), reveals a woman with similar features and supports the proposed identification.

The close commercial ties between Poland and Holland during this time spanned grain, lumber, and shipbuilding industries, attracting many Polish nobleman to complete their studies at Leiden University. As is perhaps most famously exemplified in Rembrandt's Polish Rider (The Frick Collection, New York), Dutch artists were fascinated at this time by Polish subjects, and particularly delighted by exotic Polish costumes. Bol himself undertook a Polish subject on at least one other occasion, for the Portrait of a Boy in Polish Costume now in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam (inv. 1071). Albert Blankert (loc. cit.) has dated the present work to c. 1656, which Peter Sutton notes is also the date of the Boijmans picture. Supporting this dating, Sutton also compares the present work to Bol's Portrait of a Woman of 1652 also in the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen (inv. 1070) and his undated Portrait of Anna Rijkens sold at Christie's, London, 24 April 1998, lot 46, but points out that both those pictures lack the “emotive subtlety” of the present work (P. Sutton, loc. cit.).