Portraits by the Mysterious “Master I.S.”:  An Art History Detective Story

A long absence from Leiden

Before last week, I hadn’t been to the Lakenhal Museum in Leiden since January 1978. Back then, I was 22 y.o., and one of ten graduate students on a tour of Netherlands art museums. Our guide was Franklin Robinson, an expert in early modern Dutch Art and a man of limitless enthusiasm. “Uitstekend!” he’d exclaim, before picture after picture.  He expounded upon everything on view, I’m sure, plus artworks in storage – and I tried to absorb it all.  But the only thing in the collection I clearly remembered when I returned 47 years later, was David Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life with Portrait of a Young Painter (1651). Seeing it again, it prepared me for a remarkable exhibition at the Lakenhal called Masterful Mystery – On Rembrandt’s Enigmatic Contemporary (until March 8) about an artist known to us only as Master [or Monogrammist] I.S. His art – which mostly consists of hyper-realist tronies, or character studies such as Portrait of a Woman, Facing Left, ca. 1650 – marks the boundary between non-portrait and portrait, as does Bailly’s. But I.S.’s works have a greater verism and poignancy than Bailly’s, Jan Lievens’ or almost any other Dutch artist of the time, save perhaps  Johannes Vermeer. To me, his art anticipates nothing so much as photographs by 20th-century documentarians like the Americans Dorothea Lange, or better, Diane Arbus.  But how did this strange and affecting body of work come to exist? Whodunit and why?

Bailly’s Vanitas Still life with Portrait of a Young Painter

The subject matter of Bailly’s Vanitas Still Life is literally written on the picture, on a cartellino at the bottom right: “Vanitas vani(ta)tum et omnia vanitas.” The line comes from the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2-4:

“Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. /What profit hath a man of all his labor which he taketh under the sun? /One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.”

Dutch Calvinists of the 17^th century adapted as creed this dour corner of the Hebrew bible, preaching that Christ provided an alternative to the depraved pursuit of worldly goods. Drawing upon Paul’s letters to the Romans and Galatians, they argued that salvation comes through faith alone, and that all work is a calling from God: “Your labor is not in vain in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 15:58). It’s a suitable belief for a nation of traders, manufacturers, investors and savers. Max Weber saw it as a “Protestant ethic” underlying an emerging “spirit of capitalism.”

Yet few nations have ever been more focused on material life and the accumulation of wealth than the Dutch Republic in its Golden Age. The contradiction between Calvinist frugality and capitalist accumulation was resolved by a veritable army of talented ideologists, including artists of genius like Rembrandt, Vermeer, Frans Hals and many others.  They managed at once to affirm and deny the moral validity of wealth and splendor, celebrating abundance while also preaching the virtue of its absence. Bailly’s painting is filled with luxurious tokens of worldly knowledge and aesthetic refinement – pearls, a flute, sculptures, coins, fine glassware, silver, prints, papers and an inkwell; but it also contains apprehensions of transience and death – soap bubbles, an hourglass, wilting flowers, a half-burned candle and a skull. Freud might have learned about dream interpretation (“turning [one thing] into the opposite”) from Dutch still-life paintings such as Bailly’s: luxury signifies paucity; dearth suggests lavishness, vanity stands for modesty.

The figures in Vanitas Still Life are as paradoxical as the props. The seated young man at left with ample chin and pursed lips is clearly an artist — he holds in his right hand a maulstick, used for steadying a paintbrush, and is accompanied by objects typically found in an atelier – paintings, a drawing and print tacked to the back wall, a Roman-style bust and Baroque sculpture of St. Sebastian. But is this a portrait – perhaps of the young Bailly himself – or a tronie? And what about the paintings on display? The old man within an oval (in an oblong canvas) could be a self-portrait. The artist was 67 when he painted the work. The young woman could be Mrs. Bailly, decades earlier, and the ghostly figure on the wall behind the flute glass the artist’s wife in her maturity. Nobody knows for certain, and it’s not even clear whether the artist did.

Bailly was working with a set of conventions in flux. Portraiture was in crisis even as it reached its creative apotheosis. By the mid-1650s, Frans Hals’s career was in shambles. Rembrandt’s too: his dark, thickly impastoed surfaces and figures with soft but still penetrating gazes – eyes that follow you around the room – were disfavored by a gentry that increasingly preferred the elegance and insouciance associated with the French court of Louis XIV. He would die penniless in 1669. Until Van Gogh, more than two centuries later – another Dutchman who died broke –there was no greater portrait painter.

Portrait theory

Portraiture is a type or “genre” of art. Its purpose is to represent individuals or groups so they can be recognized by viewers. A portrait doesn’t have to closely resemble its subject, however, to be successful, as long as it is accepted as a likeness. Shakespeare may have looked like the figure in the famous Chandos canvas, but that’s irrelevant to its status as a portrait. Anytime we view a bust-length figure – high forehead, long, thin moustache, short beard, shiny loop-earing and lace collar – we know we’re looking at a portrait of the greatest of all English writers.

Even highly abstracted treatments of a face and body may be portraits. Picasso’s Cubist Portrait of Daniel Henry Kahnweiler (1910) doesn’t look much like photos of the famous art dealer, but the title of the work assures us it’s him.  The same is true of Matisse’s Portrait of Madame Matisse (1905), also known as The Green Stripe. Conversely, just because a figure in a painting – a Dutch painting, say –looks like it was painted from life (“naer het leven”), doesn’t mean it was, or that it’s a portrait. That’s because artists are good at painting from memory (“van onthout”) and from imagination (“uit den gheest); and because live models are often used as bases for fictional or historical figures.

For all these reasons, it’s often difficult to tell if a Dutch work of art from the 17^th century is a portrait (conterfeytsels) or a tronie. Many pictures lack documentation, so we don’t know who, if anybody, was the subject of a given canvas or who may have commissioned it. As a rule, paintings of prosperous-looking people in contemporary costume are presumed portraits, and poor people tronies. After all, it’s generally only the rich who can afford commissioned portraits, though in the Dutch Republic, even some shopkeepers could.  Wealthy people also enjoyed owning pictures of poor people — so long as the latter are shown as weak, subordinate, ugly, drunk, or just different from themselves.

Finally, and to reiterate, even in 17th-century Holland, with its great portrait painters like Hals and Rembrandt, there’s no reason to believe a commissioned portrait looks very much like the person it’s supposed to portray.  If we saw Jan Six, a prominent Dutch magistrate and later Amsterdam mayor, walking down the Kloveniersburgwal in 1654, it’s unlikely we would recognize him from the famous painting by his friend Rembrandt from the same year. As the great Dutch collector Hofstede de Groot observed in 1915:

[Because] people had to stoop to entreaty if they would be painted by [Rembrandt], he could impose his own terms instead of having them dictated by others. He could light his models in the way that seemed to him most beautiful; he could adorn them in the manner that he thought appropriate to their character, indicate to them the best pose to take, and determine the degree of finish in the execution. Free from all external hindrances, he could then create; he no longer aimed at securing so exact a likeness of his sitter.

The main reason Rembrandt and other artists of the time were unconcerned if painted portraits looked much like the sitter, was not however pride or artistic independence. For the Dutch, corporate identity – familial, dynastic, commercial – was far more important than individual identity. Jan Six was recognized first of all as the son of his wealthy, cloth merchant father Jean, son-in-law of the famous physician and Amsterdam mayor Nicolaes Tulp (the subject of Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp) and as a humanist, magistrate and art collector. The achievement of physiognomic resemblance in portraits only became significant much later. With the rise of individualism, the empowerment of workers and the lower middle class, and the emergence of the disciplines of psychology and sociology in the 19^th century, the idea grew that all people possessed a unique and authentic self that accompanied them their whole lives and that could be captured by an artist or photographer. That’s when portraiture in the modern sense was born.

There were, of course, exceptional artists in the 17^th Century (and before) who anticipated this modern view about identity. Rembrandt, in fact, may be included among them, though the identity he exhibited in his best paintings was his own, not his subjects. We’d search in vain for the psychological core of Jan Six in Rembrandt’s portrait, or that of members of the Amsterdam militia company in Rembrandt’s group portrait, The Night Watch. That’s why paintings by the mysterious Master I.S. – to whom we now return – are remarkable. His faces are so individualized and lifelike, that we take them to be portraits of specific, historical people with unique identities. They are not tronies like those of Gerrit Dou (see below); and they reveal neither corporate identities nor the personhood of the artist, like Rembrandt’s do. The best of them possesses what the literary critic Roland Barthes described as “puncta,” unusual details that reduce the distance of space and time between subject and viewer. If we saw the model in Portrait of a Woman, facing Left (illustrated at the top of this column) walking on the street, we would recognize her in an instant. The puncta are many: the facial asymmetry, full lips, blemish on her lower left cheek, and especially, the tumor on her left, upper eyelid. Sadly, it’s a subaceous carcinoma, a particularly aggressive skin cancer. Without surgery to remove it, she’ll certainly die.

The Mysterious Master I.S

The installation of works by the Master I.S. at the Lakenhal was unlike any I have ever seen. The first gallery was an empty white cube, with indiscernible effigies projected on the walls. The second was almost pitch dark, leading through black beaded curtains into a blacklit (UV-A) gallery.  I half expected to see velvet paintings and smell marijuana and patchouli. What I experienced instead was more than two dozen pictures spot illuminated. The idea, I guess, was to convey mystery, but there’s mystery and grandeur enough in the 16 paintings by Master I.S. and comparative works by Dou, Lievens, Bailly and Rembrandt. The collection would have looked great in a parking garage. Yet I must admit the works stood out brilliantly amid the gloom, allowing spectators to take in the works both individually and in their totality. It’s a terrific exhibition, and the mystery concerns Master I.S.’s sitters’ identities, as well as his own.

Given that nothing is known about I.S., the proposition that he was based in Leiden was over-emphasized by the installation and didactics. The curatorial argument is that the subjects and style of I.S.’s paintings (there are no known drawings or prints by him), associate him with local artists – Lievens, Rembrandt, Dou, Bailly and Jan Davidsz. de Heem. Like them, he painted scholars in their studies surrounded by books, artworks and curiosities of nature. In addition, and also like them, he deployed a “fijnschilders” (“fine painter”) style that entailed a highly detailed finish. This approach is apparent in Dou’s tronie, Old Woman Reading (1631-32), which reveals every line and wrinkle in her face and hand, the texture of the fur collar and hat she wears, and even details of the pages of the book she is reading. It’s a bible, Chapter 19 of the Gospel of Luke: “And Zacchaeus stood, and said unto the lord: Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold.”  The passage might have been heard in a Dutch Reform sermon; we’re being told the old woman is devout.

There are at least three problems with the argument of a Leiden origin for Master I.S. First, the dating is off. The unknown painter’s greatest works in fijnschlders style, like his Portrait of an  Old Woman (1651), date from the mid 1640s and after, not the 1630s when Dou, Lievens and the others developed and popularized the approach. If I.S. was in Leiden then, why don’t his early pictures reveal the influence of those artists?  Instead, they are rather freely – or at least imprecisely — painted. 2) The verisimilitude of his best pictures, like the Woman Facing Left, Portrait of an Old Woman, and Man with a Blind Eye (c. 1645-50) is so remarkable that it’s hard to believe I.S.’s talent was not recognized and name recorded in a city that revered its painters but by the 1640s, had few great ones. With the departure of Rembrandt, Lievens and de Heem for Amsterdam in 1631 — and Dou (and later his pupil Frans van Meiris) dominating the scene — an artist of I.S.’s unique abilities would have stood out among the 30 or so local painters listed in 17^th century Leiden inventories. And finally, 3) The costumes and settings of some of I. S.’s figure paintings suggest a Baltic or Scandinavian origin. This possibility is recognized by Volker Manuth and Marieke de Winkel in their fine essay for the exhibition catalogue but didn’t affect the exhibition’s basic Leiden story-line.

There are many clues to I.S.’s possible Baltic or Scandinavian ties. Two paintings in the exhibition, Old Woman, (1645) and Man with a Growth on his Nose (1645), come from Stockholm’s National Museum via the Swedish Count Johan Gabriel Stenbock (1640-1705). He was an eager importer of Dutch paintings as were many other Scandinavian and Baltic nobles and merchants of the time. There was a peak in the export of artworks, as Angela Jager has recently shown, from the Netherlands to Danish and Swedish ports in the 1630s, according to trade and customs records, though the trade continued later, mediated by a network of Scandinavian art dealers. Denmark and Sweden also hosted large numbers of wealthy immigrants from the Low Counties – including artists — who would have brought with them Dutch pictures and painting skills. Could I.S. have been a self-taught Danish or Swedish artist, who saw or even collected works by Leiden and other Dutch masters in the 1630s, but subsequently established his own artistic identity? German speaking Estonia, including Livonia to the south, was at the time part of the Swedish Empire, so the geographical reach of Dutch art and culture was wide.

The labor intensity of I.S.’s craft, suggests he was an artist of financial as well as artistic independence. The fine linen, or possibly silk head scarf worn by the Old Woman was the result of repeatedly dragging an almost dry brush across the surface, creating innumerable waves and folds. The headdress covers another, brocaded cloth just visible at the back of her head. Her eyes too are the patient product of careful layering and tonal shading, with paint applied in radiating lines and hatches. Notice too, the lateral hooding or sagging at the corner of her left eye, a product of aging. Such effects take considerable observation, time and patience to achieve. I.S.’s output must have been small. Was he a nobleman with copious time to observe, understand and cultivate his talents?

Art and the monstrous

The idea that I.S. was a wealthy amateur, perhaps a noble, is supported by his learned fascination with medical or other deformity. These preoccupations are apparent in four of the most extraordinary works in the Leiden exhibition – the Portrait of a Woman Facing Left, Man  with a Blind Eye, Portrait of an Old Woman, Man with a Growth on his Nose (1645) — and possibly a fifth, the early, Young Man, Half-Naked at a Desk (1638) who appears to be Master I.S.,  hermaphroditic.  Since at least Ambroise Paré’s Des Monstres et Prodiges (1573), doctors, philosophers and others had explored the origin and meaning of human and other differences and deformations. Paré argued that natural wonders, even if ugly, were expressions of God’s power as well as manifestations of his wrath, that is, punishments for sin. A life of virtue, he argued, could prevent the occurrence of monsters.

This so-called “prodigy literature” grew in scope and ambition in the early 17^th century with the publication of Fortunio Liceti’s De Monstruorum Causis, Natura et Differentiis (On the Reasons, Nature, and Differences of Monsters, 1616). There, the author explored, categorized and illustrated different types of deformity – for example bodily deficiencies, excesses, and hybrids — and theorized about the causes for each. These might be inheritance, faulty semen or eggs, illness, or a mistake of Nature.  Yet even in its failure, Nature was like an artist who created unique forms out of crude or base materials.

A few decades later, Ulisse Aldrovandi, in his Monstrorum Historia (1642), catalogued and classified various bodily deformities (of the head, limbs, etc), describing them all as part of the “theatre” of natural history. Though he claimed his illustrations were based upon individuals or specimens he had seen with his own eyes – including from his own, vast collection — they are often phantasmagorical, including men with necks like herons or legs like mermaids, and children with elephant trunks. (The latter are derived from Liceti’s illustrations.) His copious writings and Wunderkammer (still preserved in Bologna) comprised an encyclopedia of nature that became a basis for the binomial classifications of the Swedish physician and botanist, Carl Linnaeus (Systema Naturæ, 1758).

Given his paintings of scholars in their studies and natural prodigies, M.S. may have been a physician or natural scientist and his portraits a form of medical investigation or classification. Though he worked 100 years before Linnaeus, he could have read Aldrovandi and his Swedish follower, the Uppsala physician Johannes Chesnecopherus (1581–1635). Master I.S.’s anatomical observations, we have already seen, were remarkably acute. In addition to the cancerous tumor on the eyelid of the figure in Portrait of a Woman facing Left, and the folds of skin around the eyes of the Old Woman, there’s the Man with the Growth on his Nose who clearly suffers from Rhinophyma. (The condition is highly disfiguring, and can cause nasal obstruction, but is unlikely to be fatal.)  The man appears to be of high status, wearing a fur cape and gold chain with escutcheon-shaped medallion around his neck. The latter has not been identified, but it could be a gold medal issued by Swedish King Gustavus Adolfus (reigned 1611-32) or another contemporary Swedish or German ruler. These Gnadenpfennige were given as gifts to followers, courtiers, or high-ranking military officers. The medallion isn’t Dutch. Governing Stadtholders never wore crowns, which were symbols of the reviled Spanish Habsburgs.

Other details of costume, as Manuth and de Winkel argue, also suggest a Scandinavian or Estonian context for these works. I’d add to that the interior furnishings in Master I.S.’s, Two Scholars in a High Room, 1640. The three-legged chair could be German, Dutch or Scandinavian.

The chandelier is a Geweihleuchter made of antlers, popular in the Baltic region and German-speaking lands of Central Europe from the late 14^th to 17^th centuries and revived in the 19^th. It isn’t Dutch; nor are the costumes, which are again Baltic, possibly Estonian or Livonian, as Manuth and de Winkel suggest.

Who was I.S. and what was his achievement?

My art history whodunit ends on a hesitant note. No one can definitively say whether Master I.S. is Dutch, Swedish, Danish, Estonian, or even Polish. We assume it’s a man because of the paucity of great women artists at the time – they were only rarely given the opportunity to work, or the time to fully develop their skills. But there are some, like the Haarlem portrait painter Judith Leyster, and the German painter and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian.

I.S. may have seen the work of Leiden fijnschilders like Lieven or Dou, but that’s not certain; his portraits are more detailed and less sentimental than theirs.  He may have been a professional artist or an amateur, though the former seems unlikely given his small oeuvre and labor-intensive methods. He was probably a learned artist and possible a nobleman, given his independence of eye and mind.

And finally, I.S. seems to have been a portrait painter in the modern sense, not a maker of tronies. There is nothing stereotypical about the faces he painted. In fact, just the opposite. The features and expressions – not to mention the realistic disfigurements – are highly particular, indeed, without precedent in art history. The sagging brow, tumor, missing eye, growth on an old man’s nose, and a young man’s breasts — invite observation and inquiry rather than condescension. More than anything else, his sitters are intensely human — individual in a way that feels almost contemporary.

A week or two before travelling to the Netherlands, I happened to see Sanctum Sanctorum, an exhibition of Diane Arbus’s works at David Zwirner in London (until Jan. 17). The show consists of 45 photos of people in private interiors. They were made in New York, New Jersey, California and London between 1961 and 1971. They include some of the photographer’s best-known works and some little known ones too. What strikes me now, in retrospect, having since seen the exhibition in Leiden, is that Arbus’s best photos – her best portraits – are not of well-known or celebrity sitters (of which there are several in the Zwirner exhibition), but people whose names we generally don’t know.

Arbus met Lauro Morales at the Ringling Brothers and Barnum and Bailey Circus in NYC in 1957, and photographed him many times thereafter. But he is known to us mostly as Mexican dwarf in his New York City hotel room, 1970. The same can be said about Eddie Carmel whom Arbus first met and photographed in 1960, but then photographed again as “A Jewish giant at home with his parents, in the Bronx, N.Y., 1970.”  There is nothing caricatural or condescending about either picture. In the first, there is kindliness and a disarming absence of self-consciousness – generosity is mixed with pride. In the second, there’s careful observation of scale and the quiet concern of parents for a disabled child. Arbus’s actual portraits of celebrities like Mae West, Norman Mailer, James Brown and others, lack the same interrogatory element, or the same warmth. The former two works are modern portraits, the latter four are not.

I’d say the something similar thing about Master I.S. and Dutch portraits. His unidentified sitters are intimate, modern portraits of people we don’t know, while many of the portraits by esteemed Dutch artists of the Golden Age are more like types or even tronies. (Rembrandt’s are expressions of his own imagination, even his soul.) We may one day learn the identity of I.S. – a painting signed with a name not a monogram, an inventory, a letter, or even a will – but that will neither add nor take away from the vividness of the women and men he painted.

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