LESS THAN A dozen paintings can today be attributed to Geertgen tot Sint Jans, the most important early Dutch painter, active in Haarlem in the late fifteenth century. Some may have been lost in the course of time, but his production cannot have been very high as Geertgen’s career probably spanned no more than about ten years. Karel van Mander, to whom we owe most of our knowledge of the artist, says that he died at the age of around twenty-eight. Only two surviving paintings are doc­umented, the Lamentation of Christ and the Legend of the relics of St John the Baptist, both in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. Originally they formed the outer and inner sides of a wing of the large altarpiece that was placed on the high altar in the church of St John of the Knights Hospitaller, Haarlem. This was probably the most ambitious work Geertgen ever made, the more so because he lived, as a kind of lay brother, in that very convent, which accounts for his name ‘tot Sint Jans’. In addition, seven (mostly small-scale) single panels and a triptych are more or less unanimously regarded as authentic, while four or five other paintings are discussed as having been made by his workshop or by followers.

ONE OF VAN DYCK'S great double-portraits of the 1630s, the large canvas acquired in 1976 by the National Gallery, London, from the Spencer collection at Althorp (Fig.4), is usually believed to depict Elizabeth, Lady Thimbleby, to the left, and Dorothy, Viscountess Andover, to the right. It is suggested here that the figure to the right is Elizabeth and that the portrait dates from 1635.

UNIVERSALLY ACCEPTED AS a fine work by Rembrandt, A Polish nobleman (Fig.7) was removed in 1930 from the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, by the Soviet state and sold to Andrew Mellon the following year; since 1937 it has been in the National Gallery of Art in Washington. Its history before its appearance in the manuscript inventory of paintings belonging to Catherine II of Russia, compiled between 1773 and 1785, has been something of a mystery, although it has been convincingly suggested that the work be identified with ‘Een Ambassadeur van Moscovien, van Rembrandt kragtig geschildert’ that featured in the sale of works owned by Herman van Swoll (‘Postmeester’) in Amsterdam on 20th April 1707.3

FOR MANY YEARS, Willem Drost (1633–59), an artist active in Amsterdam and Venice, was one of the most mysterious figures among Rembrandt’s pupils. As recently as the 1920s his works were attributed either to the great master himself or to other pupils such as Ferdinand Bol, Carel Fabritius, Nicolaes Maes and Barent Fabritius. Other names that have been put forward as possible authors of his works include Gerard van Honthorst, Hendrick ter Brugghen, Vermeer, Murillo, Caravaggio, Domenico Fetti, Andrea Sacchi and Salvator Rosa. That list alone provides evidence of the high quality of Drost’s paintings. Even canvases bearing the artist’s signature have misled scholars since he wrote his name in different ways – using both the Italian spelling of his name, Guglielmo, and a Latinised version, Wilhelmus. Many elements of the artist’s biography, such as the date of his death, were incorrectly given until very recently.

THE SMALL Portrait of a man (Fig.17) by the Flemish painter Gonzales Coques (1618–84), never previously published and long forgotten in the State Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg, was identified by Catherine Phillips in the course of her study of the collection of Johann Carl (Charles) Philipp Cobenzl. As she has demonstrated, it was in the collection of Count Cobenzl, Plenipotentiary Minister in the Austrian Netherlands of the Archduchess and Empress Maria Teresa, and was acquired from him by Catherine the Great in 1768, not from the Crozat collection, as was previously thought.

ALTHOUGH FEW WOULD now agree with the nineteenth-cent­ury assessment of Arnold Houbraken as nothing more than a scandalmonger and his Groote schouburgh is no longer dismissed as ‘the prime source of all the errors, all the stories, all the calumnies’ in the history of seventeenth-century Dutch art, modern scholars know that he did not always get his facts straight and sense that he preferred humorous or moralising anecdotes to the truth. The recent exhibition devoted to Karel du Jardin at the Rijksmuseum provided an opportunity to examine the accuracy of some of Houbraken’s remarks about that artist’s life. True to form, Houbraken’s biography of Du Jardin includes a few comic episodes, the most memorable of which involves Du Jardin’s journey with Sir Joan Reynst to Texel, where the latter was to embark for Italy. Houbraken reports that Du Jardin made the trip to Texel wearing his slippers and, suddenly having decided to join Reynst on his sea voyage, ‘wrote to his wife the following day asking for a change of linen’. Although it was not possible to confirm nor repudiate this – on the face of it – thoroughly plausible story, it was possible to gain more insight into the validity of Houbraken’s statements about the relationship between Du Jardin and Joan Reynst. A supposed portrait of the latter by Du Jardin in the Rijksmuseum (Fig.20) and shown in the exhibition gave impetus to this research and it was discovered that the sitter in another portrait by Du Jardin in the Rijksmuseum (Fig.19), also in the exhibition, is mentioned by Houbraken in conjunction with the artist as well.

IN THE NORTH Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, is a small canvas showing a seated young man in stylish clothing with long hair and a hint of a moustache, his hat set at a rakish angle. As he steadies a glass filled with white wine in his left hand, his elbow and forearm rest on an open tric-trac board. Dice and game pieces are nearby, as is white chalk for keeping score (Fig.25).