Joost van Wegenvoort (1628-?) Dutch

"WEDDING PORTRAIT OF ADRIANNA van HOOGSTRATEN"

Little is known about this artist. There are references to the birth at Delft of a person of that name. Other documents, court records not at all complimentary, describe him as a part-time student or apprentice of Carel Fabritius. Joost van Wegenvoort may have been something of a brawler, but sufficiently talented to be received as an associate in the studio of one of the better artists to emerge from the shadow cast by the great Rembrandt. He would have been just 26 years old at the time of Fabritius’s tragic and untimely death in the 1654 gunpowder explosion at Delft.

The identification of sitter and artist is based on a label (subsequently lost) which was affixed to the rear of the panel when it appeared at an auction in Munich in 1941. (Photographic advertisement in Berliner Zeitung, February 21, 1941.) The whereabouts of the painting (i.e. its provenance) between that date and the present is unclear.

This painting owes much to the late painterly style of both Rembrandt and Jan Lievens in the treatment of the hands and clothes of the sitter. The treatment of the face, on the other hand, suggests that this artist was being influenced by the "smooth" surfaces and strict draughtsmanship characteristic of such "second generation" artists as Vermeer and Fabritius. The painting is likely a work of the mid 1650’s.

Finally, considering the obvious quality and maturity of this work and the absence of any known painting accredited authoritatively to a Joost van Wegenvoort, one may, of course, doubt the the reliability of an attribution based solely on a "lost label". On the other hand, the Hoogstraten name was well known in art circles. Was Adrianna the wife of the painter Dirk van Hoogstraten (1596-1640) and mother of Samuel van Hoogstraten (1627-78), a very well known portrait painter and one-time student of Rembrandt? Considering the probable mid-century date of this painting (see above), it is more likely that Adrianna was either the sister (if Hoogstraten was her maiden name) or the wife of Samuel. Or did she marry Joost? Certainly, Samuel and Adrianna were close contemporaries of the elusive Joost (Samuel and Joost were born just one year apart). Did Joost paint this portrait as a friend of Samuel and the Hoogstraten family? For all we know, the Joost of record may have shared his master’s fate in the explosion that wracked Delft. We note that several bodies were so damaged as to make identification impossible. And surely, there must be some reason that we have so few works attributed to this artist, and that so little is remarked of him in the Guild records of the second half of the century. These three, Joost, Samuel and Adrianna, would have been in their mid twenties at the time of the accident in Delft. Of course, this is all speculation.

I invite further study and discussion of this fine painting.

Adrianna	See Details and Enlargements
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