JAN WEENIX (AMSTERDAM 1641-1719)

Though chiefly known for his still lifes of game and live animals, portraits formed an important part of Jan Weenix’s artistic output, more than fifty of which survive today. His earliest, still immature, portraits – which are datable to the 1670s – depict groups of figures with disproportionately small heads set within verdant gardens teeming with sculpture and architecture. Weenix’s early portraits of women tend to show them seated, though from 1693 he began to depict his female sitters standing, as is evident in paintings like his Portrait of Lodewina Schey with a Servant and a Cockatoo (see Van Wagenberg-Ter Hoeven, op. cit., p. 164, no. 69, illustrated).

The woman’s elegant dark blue velvet dress with gold trim, the Oriental carpet and the exotic white parrot seen at lower right – perhaps alluding to a real menagerie – all mark the sitter as a woman of status. The Italianate architectural setting with an archway which opens onto a garden setting serves to reinforce these ideas and recalls the compositional elements and style found in paintings by his father and master, Jan Baptist Weenix.