Govert Flinck

Although Govert Flinck today is not as well-known as Rembrandt, Vermeer or Frans Hals, he earned great fame during his own lifetime and (contrary to a persistent platitude that artists often die poor) he died a wealthy man. His fame is evident in the poems that were written on his death by poets he had befriended.

One of these poems, by Joost van den Vondel (1587-1679), served as a caption for the portrait that was made posthumously by Abraham Bloteling after a painting by Gerard Pietersz van Zijl¹.That such a print was published shortly after Flinck’s death is yet another sign of his fame at the time. The poem below the portrait describes what would have been Flinck’s greatest achievement had he not died, at the age of 45, on 2 February 1660. Just before his death, Flinck had received a commission from the burgomasters of Amsterdam to paint a twelve-piece decoration for the new Town Hall in Dam square². The decorations were to depict scenes from the history of the revolt of the Batavians against the Romans as recorded by Tacitus (c. 56 – c. 120)³. The Dutch saw the Batavians as their ancestors. Vondel writes:

Thus lived Apelles Flinck, torn away from the city too fast
When he, commissioned by the noble government,
Would paint histories for our delightful town hall’s ornament
As Tacitus expressed them in the past
He who teaches Rome for Batavian justice to bow down
Give this heroic painter eternal laurels as a crown⁴.

A final indication of Flinck’s fame at the end of his life is the impressive silver medal that was coined to commemorate his death⁵.

This medal has yet another commemorative poem by Vondel on one side⁶, while on the other side we see a man on his death bed, illuminated by a heavenly halo with two putti to the sides holding a banderole that reads: «Behold, death is an entrance to life»⁷. The medallist obviously had eternal life in mind, but he also offers us a literal entry into Govert Flinck’s life. In the cartouche beneath the lying man he engraved Flinck’s birthdate, 25 January 1615, and his birthplace, Cleves, as well as his date and place of death. This posthumous medal is the earliest and only source for Flinck’s birthdate.

Archival sources are missing for the painter’s early years. In fact, the first time he is mentioned in any archive at all is in 1637, when he bought some prints at an Amsterdam auction⁸. By then he was already 22 years old and working as a painter in the city. For evidence of his earlier life, we have to rely on early biographers, particularly Arnold Houbraken’s early 18th-century biography in his anthology of lives of Dutch painters⁹. Although he had access to reliable information (he knew Flinck’s son Nicolaes), as with every early modern biographer he mixes fact with topos and formulaic ideas about artists, which suggests prudence.

We can safely say, at any rate, that Flinck was born and raised in Cleves, in present-day Germany. His father was a merchant in the city and the family was of the Mennonite confession. Flinck’s first teacher was Lambert Jacobsz (c. 1598-1636), who lived and worked in Leeuwarden. After learning to paint there, he moved to Amsterdam c. 1634, where he worked as an assistant to Rembrandt (1606-69) in the workshop of art dealer Hendrick Uylenburgh (c. 1587-1661). He learned to paint in Rembrandt’s style, which was in high demand at the time. In Houbraken’s undoubtedly exaggerated words, he learned to mimic Rembrandt so well that «several of his works have been considered sold as real paintings by Rembrandt»¹⁰. It is, however, clear that he did learn the style and used what he had learned to produce his own work, even long after Rembrandt had left the Uylenburgh workshop in 1635. Flinck started signing and dating work from 1636 onwards.

He made a name for himself as a painter of portraits and biblical and mythological history paintings, whichs soon led to prestigious commissions for civic guard paintings in 1642 and 1645 for the large hall of the Kloveniersdoelen, where Rembrandt’s Nightwatch also originally hung¹¹. Flinck probably worked for Uylenburgh until 1644, the year in which he bought two adjacent houses on Lauriergracht where he lived and worked for the remainder of his life. A year later, he married Ingittha Thoveling (c. 1620-51), the daughter of a governor of the East India Company. Their son, Nicolaes Flinck (1646-1723) was born in 1646.

In 1648, Flinck received yet another commission for a civic guard painting, the Company of Joan Huydecoper Celebrating the Treaty of Münster¹².

It was around this time that Flinck appears actively to have sought aristocratic patronage. In 1648-50 he painted an allegory on the birth of the son of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg (1620-88) that he presented to the father as a gift¹³. This brought him commissions from the elector in 1652¹⁴, and other nobles followed suit, such as Johan Maurits of Nassau (1604-79) and Amalia van Solms¹⁵.

Inghitta Thoveling died in 1651. This is the moment where biographer Houbraken claims that Flinck was «inclined to larger enterprises». In Amsterdam, the construction of the new Town Hall on Dam square and its lush decoration offered tantalising opportunities for the artists in the city, including Flinck. In 1656, he had his first opportunity to show his skills in the building when he painted Manius Curius Dentatus Rejects the Samnites’ Gifts over one of the chimneys in the burgomasters’ meeting room¹⁶. That year Flinck also remarried. His bride, Sophia van der Hoeven (?-1669) from Gouda, was a second niece of his first wife¹⁷. In 1658, Flinck painted a second decoration for the town hall, Solomon Prays for Wisdom¹⁸. A year later, to mark Elector Friedrich Wilhelm of Brandenburg’s wife’s visit to Amsterdam, Flinck was asked to make four life-size watercolour sketches for the planned Batavian cycle in the galleries of the town hall¹⁹. They appear to have been found pleasing, because soon after he also received the commission to paint the final cycle in its entirety. His death three months later prevented him from embarking on the project.

In modern art history Flinck, has often been seen predominantly in the context of his connection with Rembrandt, the giant of Dutch 17th-century painting. In his own time, however, he was appreciated for other things. He developed his style gradually with evolving tastes, but also flexibly changed his manner according to the needs of individual commissions or clients. After initially learning the styles of his teachers Lambert Jacobsz and Rembrandt, he later developed a more classicising style inspired by Flemish masters such as Van Dyck and Rubens, and towards the end of his life, also by Italian examples. This led him to win high profile commissions from the city of Amsterdam and from nobility both within and outside the Dutch Republic. Thus, he played an important role in the cultural life of Amsterdam at a time when that city was at the height of its power and wealth.