Interestingly, rather than inscribing the conventional ‘ÆTATIS’, denoting the age of the sitter, the artist has here chosen to write ‘ÆTATVIS’, literally reading as ‘your age’, which implies a degree of intimacy between the painter and sitter. Aged 29 in 1591, our sitter was probably born in 1562, information that can usually assist in identifying the subject of a portrait. Considering this, and that the painting was likely created in Amsterdam, a potential candidate could be the influential merchant Hans Claesz (1562 – 1623), who was a founding member and director of the New Netherlands Company and the Nordic (Greenland) Whaling Company.

Claesz was primarily involved in the fur trade and had commercial interests on the Bay of Biscay, but he also shipped large quantities of wood from Sweden to Spain, as well as salt from Riga. His shipping organisation, the Hans Claesz Compagnie, had a patent from the Staten Generaal to trade near the Hudson area in North America. This expanded when, with the permission of the stadholder Prince Maurits, it merged with other Amsterdam-based shipping companies to become the New Netherlands Company, a precursor of the Dutch West India Company (WIC). In around 1589, Hans married Magdalena Snellaert (d.1624) and they had one daughter who survived adulthood, Susanna Claessen (b. 1599).[1] Not much is known about his life after the patent for the New Netherlands Company expired in 1618, but the Claesz. family lived at the Keizersgracht 118-120 in Amsterdam. Hans was buried in the Nieuwe Kerk on Dam Square.

Born in Gouda, the artist Cornelis Ketel (1548 – 1616) was the illegitimate child of Elisabeth Jacobsdr Ketel (d.1582) and art collector Govert Jans van Proyen (d.1574). He trained under his uncle Cornelis Jacobsz. Ketel (d.c.1568), after whom he was presumably named, and in Delft with Anthonie Blocklant. He then briefly moved to Fontainebleau c.1565, but returned to Gouda where he practiced for six years. In 1573 he arrived in London as one of the many immigrant artists to enrich London’s artistic community. He established a studio where he painted the ‘great lords of the nobility with wives and children’ and stayed in London for eight years, working primarily as a portraitist.[2] Amongst his most important commissions, apparently ordered by Edward Seymour, 1st Earl of Hertford in 1578, was a portrait of the queen, Elizabeth I. Although Ketel enjoyed great success with portraiture, his desire was to be known as a painter of grand historical and allegorical subjects. However, there were few patrons in Elizabethan England for such works and, according to his friend and biographer, Karel van Mander (1548 – 1606), though he ‘obtained many portrait commissions [there were] but none for histories towards which his spirit still ever inclined’.[3] It was for this reason that it is believed Ketel to have left London for Amsterdam in 1581. Van Mander also heroicised Ketel’s remarkable technical dexterity; he recounts how, without the use of brush or pencil, he could paint with extraordinary effect using just his fingers, and even his toes.[4]

Ketel married Aeltje Gerritsdr (d. 1606), who was also from Gouda, in 1574 in London; the couple had three children who were baptized there: Gedeon (1576 – 1579), Ezechiell (b. 1578), and Eve (b. 1579). The latter two had died by 28 February 1595, as was another son, Rafel, who was born in Amsterdam in 1581. A further son, Andries, died before November 1613. After his wife’s death in 1606, he married Aeltje Jansdochter (d.1630) on 4th October 1607 in Amsterdam.[5] In 1613 he was partially paralysed by a stroke and, on 5th August 1616, he died in Amsterdam, being buried in the Oude Kerk three days later.

[1] See: https://caribischegenealogie.org/hans-claesz-compagnie/

[2] K. van Mander, The Lives of the Illustrious Netherlandish and German painters, 1604, Hessel Miedema (ed.), 1994, p.358.

[3] Van Mander, ibid.

[4] Van Mander, ibid.

[5] K. Hearn, Cornelis Ketel, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Online 2004.