Cornelis Janson van Ceulen

Cornelis Janszoon van Ceulen the Younger was born in London in 1634, the son of the Anglo-Dutch portraitist Cornelis Janssens van Ceulen. He moved with his family to the Netherlands in 1643, living successively in Middelburg and Amsterdam before settling in Utrecht in 1652. Trained in his father’s studio, he continued the family’s speciality in portraiture, and worked in London again from 1675 to 1678 before returning to Utrecht, where he died in 1715. Van Ceulen painted chiefly portraits of members of the Dutch civic and intellectual elite. His sitters are presented with restrained dignity, usually in half-length or bust-length compositions, with particular attention to facial likeness, costume and the textures of fabrics. The 1657 Portrait of a Man with a Watch exemplifies his early manner: a sober palette, controlled modelling and a direct, self-possessed pose. Later portraits become somewhat more expansive and decorative, reflecting changing late-seventeenth-century taste while retaining the precise physiognomic observation inherited from his father.

His work belongs to the cosmopolitan portrait tradition linking England and the Dutch Republic, with the elegance of Anthony van Dyck forming an important background to the family style. He received commissions from Zeeland’s elite as well as Utrecht’s learned circles; among his documented sitters were the physician Johannes Munnicks , the scholar Johannes Leusden and Marcus van Uffelen