Taco Scheltema ( Harlingen 1760-1837 )

Taco Scheltema, also known as Take Pieters Scheltema, was born in Harlingen on 16 August 1760 and died at Velp, near Arnhem, on 7 September 1837. He trained in Amsterdam with the landscape and portrait painter Pleun Piera, before continuing his studies in Düsseldorf and travelling through Saxony, where he copied works by earlier masters, including Anthony van Dyck. After periods in Amsterdam, Scheltema settled in Rotterdam in 1794, establishing himself as a portraitist for the Dutch patriciate and affluent bourgeoisie. From about 1810 he lived at his country estate Landzigt near Velp, painting increasingly for pleasure rather than as a professional. Scheltema is best known for portraits, particularly life-size individual and family portraits. His sitters are often arranged in elegant groups, sometimes against open landscape backgrounds. His work combines careful observation with the polished, internationally oriented manner of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century portraiture. Contemporary-looking English influences are especially apparent in some compositions, while his firm draughtsmanship is evident in his surviving black-and-white chalk studies and landscape watercolours.

A major commission was the series of portraits of founders and directors of Rotterdam’s Batavian Society for Experimental Philosophy, begun in 1794 and continued into 1807; most of the series was destroyed by fire in 1940. Scheltema was also connected with Rotterdam’s artistic society Hierdoor tot Hooger.

His paintings are unusually difficult to attribute because he rarely signed mature works. The Louvre’s Portrait of a Woman in a Bonnet, for example, was formerly attributed to Charles Howard Hodges but is now given to Scheltema.