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Jan Weenix and the Dutch Taste
of the Orient
Anke van Wagenberg-Ter Hoeven,
Salisbury University
This paper focuses on a small
selection of paintings by the Dutch
artist Jan Weenix. While he is
mostly known for his still life
paintings with dead game and
Italianate scenes with Roman ruins,
he also painted some portraits.
Interesting is that some of the
commissioned portraits show a touch
of the orient, and give us –d
irectly and sometimes indirectly-
clues as to the world-wide trade
that was going on in the
Netherlands in the 1600s.
The paper is based on the idea of “
the return to the object,” and
therefore takes the paintings
themselves as a starting point of
the discussion. One such instance
is a 1637 painting was made by his
father, Jan Baptist Weenix, that he
painted to commemorate the visit of
ambassador Johan van Twist to the
Sultan of Visiapoer where he tried
to establish trade relations. Van
Twist served as Governor-General of
Malakka, from 1641 until 1642.
Jan Weenix had his father as a
teacher and was clearly influenced
by his style. In one of his
paintings for instance, Agneta
Block is depicted, with her husband
and children in a garden at her
newly built house the “Vijverhof,”
near Loenen aan de Vecht, where she
built a tropical plant garden. It
is known that she cultivated exotic
plants, like coffee, tobacco,
oranges and bananas and was the
first to succeed in growing a
flowering pineapple from Suriname.
I focus on her botanical collecting
successes. Agneta Block was the
cousin and close friend of Joost
van den Vondel, who mentions her
botanical collecting activities in
some of his poems. Being a painter
herself, she commissioned hundreds
of drawings and paintings of her
flowers and plants. Despite her
good intentions, wishes and
stipulations in her will to keep
the collections for posterity,
nothing remains today of her
collection. In 1717 Czar Peter the
Great visited her house, but it was
torn down in 1819.
In another portrait, Jan Weenix was
commissioned to depict a Turkish
merchant who is inspecting his
goods. The fascinating question is
that, as far as we know, Jan Weenix
only left Holland to paint in
Germany. So where did see or meet
the subject of this painting? While
it will be difficult to determine
who the patron of the scene is, it
will be fascinating to disclose the
circumstances of the
commission.
Other paintings discussed in the
context of the Dutch and the Orient
are still lifes that depict exotic
birds like a White Cockotoo, a Red
Macaw, in other words, birds that
Weenix did not have direct access
to. Or did he? The question
remains, where he might have seen
this, if indeed he created the
paintings from direct observation.
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